


Relays

by Tarasque



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015), Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi
Genre: Also Kissing, And more romance than I thought finally, But some action, Gen, M/M, More characters to be added, No Plot, Poe/Leia platonical or oedipian, Rey/Finn fraternal
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-01-03
Updated: 2018-02-04
Packaged: 2019-02-28 00:03:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 32,794
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13259388
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tarasque/pseuds/Tarasque
Summary: What's left of the Resistance has left Crait and the Falcon Millenium is creeping through backward routes. Meanwhile, Leia Organa has many torches to pass down, one to take up, and one to extinguish forever.Multichapter, one POV per chapter.First chapter up is Poe, if you know me you know why.Rey is now up! Still looking for teachers, but maybe she doesn't need them that much.Finn being uploaded! Got carried away with him and since the chapter was twice the size of the previous ones I split it in two. Garments are being passed around, the plot doesn't thicken but at least there's some action, and Finn learns about the many kinds of love.Next: Leia and Kylo Ren, in that order. And a last chapter for the one that remains, you can have a guess at who it will be if you feel like it.





	1. Poe

**Author's Note:**

> For me, stage one of fanfic after the arrival of new canon appears to be canon regurgitation: the one where you try to make sense of what you got. I'll never say it enough, I loved the new movie. I think the characters' shortcomings are the characters', not the filmmakers', and that flawed but growing characters are the best; and I hope this comes through here.
> 
> Thanks for reading!
> 
> Oh, forgot: I didn't read much of the tie-in material and I decided that I wouldn't rely too much on any existing plans of the Falcon's innards (after all, the new trilogy didn't hesitate to innovate, what with that brand new gunner's station). I hope the inaccuracies aren't too distracting.

They’re in.

Take off.

He thought they’d all die. They nearly all died. Because of what he did, send the bombers to death to the last one, send Finn and Rose and BB8 to a hare-brained hopeless mission. Because of what he didn’t, turn back when ordered, stay put when ordered. Or maybe of what he did, order the speeders to turn back when there might have been a chance to stop that cannon. And then Skywalker died.

But they’re in the ship now – what, all of the last twenty of them? Because the girl, Rey, saved the day.

Maybe because he did one good thing, when he listened for those crystal critters?

No. Because Luke bought them time.

Luke’s dead. Leia felt it.

Twenty left walking. Or so. He hasn’t counted. Maybe thirty. He hopes at least twenty, and the seven wounded they managed to haul in. There were four hundreds of them.

The Falcon’s deck is crowded but there’s going to be room plenty enough in the holds. Fucking Force, the entire Resistance contained with ease in a smallish freighter, minus the few scattered teams who were sent elsewhere. Scouts, the ones they could spare that are now _the entirety of the Resistance fire power and fleet_. Is it obscene to thank the Force for the life of Wexley and Pava, when so many are dead? When _Kare_ is dead _–_

But they’re the spark, all of them. Holdo said so.

He feels a surge of incommensurable anger, violent and short-lived, mingled with self-pity. Why didn’t she say? Why did she let them all believe that this slow-motion death, the torching of their vessels down to the last barge, stretched over _hours_ , wasn’t their only horizon? If he’d known he’d have obeyed, he’d have put _everything_ he had in the balance for more of them to reach their target…

If she'd trusted him she’d have known of Finn’s plan in time, they’d have found a reliable code-breaker, Luke would be alive, Holdo would be alive, the Resistance would be–

But he asked for unconditional obedience from the bombers, didn’t he, when he sent them to death? So why does he thinks he’s different? He should have obeyed whatever his commanding officer told him, or didn’t. That’s the thing. Not his to decide. He should have stopped believing his impulses are better than any plan. No, he should have stopped believing that sacrifice, one-on-a-million chances and a last run for glory are and are always the ultimate and best plan.

Funny, isn’t it, that _Holdo_ sacrificed herself in the end? Did she feel some guilt, too? Or did she _know_ she did right?

But they’re the spark. _He_ , Poe, said so.

These people here, these twenty or so, don’t seem to realise how unworthy he was to shoulder up this burden. They’re looking at him, hoping. He looks back, realising it’s been only some minutes since they felt that bump and surge of the Falcon breaking away, hoping nobody caught his lapse.

Finn’s there, the Force be thanked. Poe feels something that sways, surges, overflows and then steadies inside him, stronger than before. And Rose is, too, unconscious, and that little glorious wonder of a droid who calls him friend.

And so he stands straighter and assumes again the pilot persona. Charismatic. Caring, which is more than a stance, which reaches into his deepest core but that they know he’s sincere makes it easier and sort of like cheating. He becomes the man who laughs in the face of danger, who stares fate in the eye. An ace pilot. A luck magnet – ha. A _leader_ , not that he thinks he’s worthy, but they appear to believe he’s what they’ve got, did they forget Leia is still alive? – so he has to.

They’re laughing too, for that brief suspended moment in time, patting backs, hugging, congratulating each other on being alive. Unable to look back at the massacre, or forward at – who knows.

Poe pats BB8 and comforts all the others – but not Finn, who ditched the painstakingly patched-back jacket somewhere but still wears Poe’s shirt over First Order pants and the spare boots Poe found him, except with some sort of smile-glance-nod. He feels drawn to him to the point it’s physically painful not to jump and open his arms in an embrace, but Finn is fussing around an unconscious Rose and hasn’t got time for Poe. Who’d blame him? Poe is the guy who sent them to a fool’s mission and then to an even stupider ride, clunky speeders and light blasters against a Death Star. He averts his eyes and spots Rey sending little forlorn glances at Finn in exactly the same way he’s afraid he’s doing himself.

Poe has never balked from this kind of competition before but there’s a first to everything, to calling for retreat as to withdrawing from unrequited love. Of course, even before today, in the brief hours when Finn and Poe had been reunited, he’d been aware of the potential love triangle with Rey. But a love rectangle is where he draws the line.

 

Rey looks terribly powerful and terribly alone. She needs friends and they’ll need to work together, so he goes to formally introduce. It’s awkward. But nice.

 _She’s_ the spark. But is she? Would be cruel to say it aloud. A young woman, alone, carrying the hopes of the Galaxy. A handful of Resistance people sheltering her, feeding her flame and blowing on her to light the fire, not too gently. No. In his altered state, his metaphors are getting warped if not downright unhealthy and just – no.

“We’ll be the collective spark, won’t we?” he blurts, then grimaces. “Sorry. I don’t make much sense right now.” _Haven’t been for some time._

“You should sleep,” she says, looking through him like she knows what lies behind the exhaustion.

His hand is at his forehead again, trying to massage the – _thing_ – _shame_ – away. Too late to prevent himself. His jaw itches, too. He hasn’t shaved, feels disgusting.

But Rey doesn’t add anything. He likes that she respects his privacy. That she’s not one for metaphors, too. He likes her bluntness. And how her voice is pitched lower than he thought. He can see how Finn would be drawn to her.

He sighs. “They’re waiting,” he says, meaning the last twenty around them. “Where has Leia gone?”

“To – to Han’s bunk. I thought—”

“Yeah. It’s hers too. Is _she_ resting?”

“I hope so.”

“Yeah.” He clears his throat. “Well. You feel like making a speech?”

“ _No_.”

It makes him see something else in her. She’s not really trembling, more like vibrating. Not so much exhausted as on the edge. Not grieving – not yet – but raw.

Going down after the high of her life. He knows the feeling. And Force, is she young.

“Alright,” he says. “Hear me make a fool of myself.”

He likes her smile, too. Nice teeth. Definitely sees why Finn cares so much.

Doesn’t help him find the words. He breathes in.

“Okay, guys.” His voice bears. The Falcon’s main room is crowded enough, thankfully. He couldn’t have gone on if his there had been echoes. He breathes out. “Right now, we all have a name on our tongue. Many names. That we want to shout out loud. So that we remember and – Force.” He breathes in, or tries. They’re watching. _Finn_ is, his mouth pressed tight, the line on his forehead creased deep. Nobody’s crying. They probably feel as he does, and he can’t… “I can’t,” he says out loud. “There are better people than me who could have – there _were…_ I can’t.” fuck, there _were_ better people, there to find the right words, to restore hope, to give time to grieve, _dead_ , _Luke,_ _Holdo_ –

“But we’re here,” is what finally comes out of his constricted throat. “We’ll go on living. Right now, we rest, we organise, we regroup. For them. The Galaxy hasn’t gone dark. Not all of it.”

“Poe’s right,” Rey interjects. “You all need to rest. There’s room enough on the main deck. The crew’s quarters are there but I think Leia’s entitled to them. Finn found the blankets, he’ll show you. Finn, I’ll watch Rose for you.”

“Won’t we use the lower holds?” Poe asks, although he’s relieved that they can all stay close together.

“They’re very cold. Also, don’t know what Unkar Plutt did with them, but even though we tried all we could with Chewie, they _stink._ ”

C’ai nods and gets moving, along with some others. Connix remains standing, defiant, her head held high.

“We need to decide where we go and fast,” Poe says, not wanting to make the mistake Holdo did. Everyone needs to know what’s the plan. “The base we envisioned can’t be safe anymore. I can think of a couple of other candidates but anyone who wants to weigh in can come to the cockpit.”

“Right,” Rey says. “We need to listen to Chewie too.”

Many smile even if it’s watery. Chewbacca’s expertise on strategically disappearing as a way of saving Han’s ass had reached legendary status in the last years. Connix sniffles discretely and blinks.

“We are not alone,” Poe says, trying to find the certainty in himself. “We will find hope. And a place to grieve. There’ll come a time when we can say their names, all of them.”

Connix pats her hip. “I have everyone. Here. I downloaded the main comp before we left. We won’t forget them.”

 

//

 

System names have been tossed around. Calls have been taken, Poe has woken old contacts, former cadets who left the navy on times, friends of his parents, some shadier connexions, even the worst kind of fans. He has never felt more relieved than when he got a choked Wexley on the comm and Pava suspiciously close to crying in the background. They’re getting spontaneous calls, rerouted through mysterious ways. Yesterday’s solo stunt against Hux’s destroyer seems to have gained traction around the holonet as has, more deservedly, the bombers’ sacrifice. Vocations might arise from it which Poe knows is necessary – not as sure as before whether it’s good.

More importantly, the crisscrossing of conversations in the com has revealed the story of Luke’s heroic standoff. Seems that some cogs in the New Order don’t work as they should, or at least that they talk too much. Nobody in the Falcon can make sense of what they’re told, nor of what they witnessed – Luke’s lightsaber was the wrong colour, there’s no explanation on how he came on Crait nor how he entered the mine, and Rey, who’s probably not telling all she knows, says his beard was grey last time she saw him, not brown – but the story has spread like only true legends can. People will rally.

“That’s not only time he bought us. He gave us hope,” Poe said at one point, unable to look Rey in the eye. He doesn’t think she’s so fond of becoming a legend herself.

An agreement has been found on where to regroup after Finn strolled in like the thought had just crossed his mind (Poe thinks it has. He begins to know him, or he likes to think so). He just lit up the holomap again, said he didn’t know much about the Galaxy’s geography but couldn’t help hearing what they were talking about, and then, very exhaustively, outlined the contradictions, the impossibilities and the strengths of their various options, said, clear-voiced, which worlds would become dead ends and which opened up their choices. The others, even Rey, looked surprised. Finn stepped just a little closer to Poe, and the back of his hand crept down Poe’s forearm, his fingers briefly squeezing Poe’s wrist (Poe doesn’t think Finn was aware of it). In the silence, Poe smiled, took, with Rey’s help, Chewbacca’s advice on the itinerary and keyed in Finn’s best choice.

“No!” Finn said. “Poe, what if it’s not – if I’m not – what if it was like last time I…”

“Looks like our best choice,” Poe said, at the same time as Connix, one of the few still alive who know what Finn’s talking about, muttered: “last time it could have worked. If it had, we’d—”

Poe put a hand on her arm and she stopped.

Now they’re down to the logistics of settling in the Falcon for what promises to be a long, bumpy ride through backward routes but Poe isn’t sure he’s completely there anymore. When he blinks he sees wrecked frigates and shuttles bursting. Maybe there’s the phantom sound of people shouting as they’re burning. That’s not a nightmare and he’s not sleeping since he’s afraid of closing his eyes too long.

“Poe, go to sleep,” Rey says. “All of you. Food rations and fresher rotations can wait until you’re coherent.”

“You, too.” Finn says. “Rey, you look – what happened?”

Poe would swear Rey shuts off.

“What happened,” she repeats. “I – I’ll tell you. I’ll have to tell all of you. It’s – huge. But – not what I hoped. You’ve seen. Kylo Ren is in command. I – I am not Luke and I think I need some time. I – please give me time?”

“Oh,” Finn says. “Okay. Right. I’ll go check on Rose.”

That soon leave Chewbacca, a heartbroken Poe and a stunned Rey alone in the cockpit. Poe sighs.

“Give him time, too,” he says. And, since she’s still looking lost somewhere deep inside herself: “I’m going to find myself a place to sleep. But first, Finn’s right, we all need to. Would you and Chewbacca mind if we established watches at the Falcon’s dashboard? First one pilots, second co-pilots, third rests, then we rotate?”

“Third being you?”

“Ah,” Poe says, trailing a hand on the cracked, stained, polished surface of the dashboard. “It’s been my dream since I was a toddler, piloting the Falcon.”

She smiles. “When I was a kid I thought she was just garbage. She’s one-of-a-kind, the Falcon, isn’t she?”

Chewbacca howls his agreement. Poe feels a pang of sadness, a grief deeper than he’s got a right to in the midst of this tragedy.

“I lost my own ship,” he says, thinking that if some people can understand it’s these two. “Black One.”

“Your X-Wing?” Rey asks, her hand going up to grip Poe’s arm.

“I know it’s trivial with all these people dead and the Galaxy falling to the dark side, but –”

“You lost your wings,” Rey says as Chewbacca engulfs him in a hug – the hair feels softer than Poe thought.

“When I flew her, I – no, BB-8 and I, well the three of us felt like one, you know?”

She does.

Chewbacca tries a pat on Poe’s back that isn’t calibrated quite right and howls something approving that Poe isn’t completely sure he’s parsed right.

“Of course we’ll take turns piloting the Falcon,” Rey translates. “Are the three of us the only qualified?”

Chewbacca howls another name.

“Nien Nunb?” Rey asks. “Who is he?”

“Of course, Nien Nunb,” Poe says, ashamed he forgot. For a moment it had felt like the survivors of the old Rebellion are fading into legendary status, not quite there anymore. “He’s more qualified than I am, already piloted the Falcon. I think he’s with Leia right now. They’re old friends. I should have –”

“You should have gone to sleep hours ago.”

 

//

 

Poe decides to bunk on the main room bench. Other areas are likely to be even more crowded and the cushions here held up well enough, so why not? And it’s the rational choice since it’s the closest to the cockpit. Besides, Finn isn’t far, watching Rose in the corridor alcove. Maybe Poe likes how it hurts.

He thought that he’d toss and turn and watch Finn not watch him for hours. That the damp, chill air from the faulty conditioning would seep into his bones and remind him of Leia floating in space. That if he ever managed to sleep images of ships bursting in flames would jolt him awake.

He falls asleep like a stone sinks through bottomless water.

He dreams.

A chair.

He’s tied to a chair and needs to stand up to go help Finn and Rose (Kylo Ren’s laugh is echoing somewhere). There’s something wrong because he felt too warm on that chair in the Finalizer but now he feels cold, flailing in slow motion through cold water or the deep void.

Then a touch on his cheek bizarrely warms his body and he manages to stand up but he has to run to his X-Wing and he runs and runs and never reaches it and he runs and sees each and every pilot getting shot down in turn (that laugh is still there).

Then he doesn’t dream anymore, wakes up shouting.

A name.

Paige.

 

Someone dimmed the lights. Huddled shapes are tossing around, others are groaning, he hears another shout. His neck tangles in a blanket he didn’t know he had when he tries to sit up. Finn has slumped down the corridor wall to a sprawled sitting position and snores slightly, his nose still clogged by old blood. Rose’s eyes are open and glint in the dark. _Paige_ , Poe thinks her lips form.

He has to stand and get away, won’t be able to sleep anymore. He takes the time to arrange Finn in a more comfortable position and adds the blanket – Rose’s eyes look very large and her face very solemn – then leaves.

“Thinking of finding a less crowded area?” A veiled, tired, oh so comforting voice says – Leia.

“General, Ma’am –”

He can _hear_ the smirk.

“Commander.”

He sighs. “Captain, wasn’t it.”

“It was,” she says, but her voice isn’t harsh. “Yes. Captain. I made it so. I think I was right.”

Poe nods, doesn’t know if she sees it. _He_ can see the outline of her head backlit by some standby light in the corridor, the still-done hair, the few wisps escaped from her braid, too few for her to have slept on it. He doesn’t say what they both think. General, Commander, Captain, fossilised addresses from when there were more of them than a kernel of thirty refugees in a smuggler’s ship. Habit-driven, comforting. Meaningless.

“Where were you heading?” she asks. “There are sleepers everywhere.”

Hasn’t thought of it. “The lower holds, maybe?”

“They stink. I checked.”

She’s more bent than one week ago. Not frail – she’ll never let herself become frail even at death’s door, he thinks – but smaller, stooped, crouched, maybe, in the protective stance of someone who’s both wounded and bracing for attack. He passes his arm across her shoulders, pulls her to his side. Feels her lay her head against him, feels her arm and back muscles relax. Feels himself unwind a notch.

“Couldn’t sleep either?” he asks.

“I have a few names of my own that I shout at night. More than a few. So, what about the gunner’s well? Nobody’s likely to have gone there.”

“Is there room enough for two?”

“Of course there is. Did it often.”

They both know with whom. Must have felt cosy back then. He can’t help the heat creeping up his neck, like a ten years old who realises what his parents have been doing behind that closed door.

“Did you give me the blanket?” he asks as they walk to the ladder.

“No. I would have, but Finn beat me to it.”

And here it comes, this other kind of heat, the one that warms him all around like he hasn’t any right to.

“You saw him?”

“A rare advantage of our quarters being so cramped. A general hasn’t so many opportunities to watch commanders sleep.”

“Captains.”

“Captains. I think he touched your cheek, too.”

Poe thinks he might not have parsed it right. Two X-wings blowing off into his face in a little more than a week did nothing to help his hearing. He nods again, because he truthfully doesn’t know how else to react. Thankfully climbing down the ladder saves him from having to show his face.

The gunner’s station is _very_ cramped.

“There’s a bolt somewhere,” Leia says. “You can unlock the backrest, turn it into a two-person cou-- bench. Han was, uh, very resourceful. Sometimes.”

“Wait,” Poe says, managing to kneel between the walls and the seat. “I’ve spent my whole adult life trying to do, ah, things in an X-Wing, I think I can guess how he – yeah, here.”

He looks up and sees Leia watching him with her head tilted and another of her smirks. Of course she already knew how to unlatch that, and of course she knows that having gallantly tried to do something for her that she could do by herself makes him feel like a fool. Deservedly.

She definitely enjoys standing over him, though. Does he say it aloud?

“There’s – there was a subset of people in the Resistance who’d have squeed to see us like that.” Him and his big mouth.

She looks down, regal. “Well, get on with it.”

The unlocked seat barely accommodates two people. They end up with their legs each on one side, more or less back to back, their heads half-turned towards each other. Silence stretches.

“Is this a debriefing?” Poe asks.

He feels her sigh through his ribcage more than he hears it.

“This is two people who can’t sleep and might find comfort in each other. Do you think I have any grounds for acting as your commanding officer anymore?”

“Of course you have!”

“I’ve failed, Poe. I know you feel like you did too, but I told you, can you imagine the amount of names I could shout throughout my nightmares? Names of people who died because of me? Of people I couldn’t help? Of worlds that fell? General, ha. How could you still call me that?” She laughs, like blades. “I demote myself.”

“No!” Poe yells too forcefully. “No. Just imagine how much worse it’d be without you! All these years. And now. Princess, Senator, General. Not yours to demote yourself! I, no, _we_ know who you are for us.”

Silence.

“I’m tired of it,” she says in a toneless voice.

It breaks his heart even though he guesses she’s only admitting it between the both of them. His hand finds one of hers. Is it colder than it should?

“There’s one name I keep shouting in my sleep,” she says.

 _Ben_ , Poe thinks, feeling something clench around his heart.

“Yours. I thought that I had such a need for your skills – that the Resistance had a need. So that it trumped any concerns I could have for your safety. And you – you kept coming back, and I told myself the Force was with you, that it validated my decisions, that I– and each time you came back I became a little more afraid of the next time I’d have to send you out.”

“But I’m alive,” Poe says. “I chose—”

 “Yes. My nightmare brain isn’t that good at mourning, it appears. It cares for people who’re still in a position to feel harm. Seems to me now that the only thing I achieved was teaching you that sacrifice is the only service that matters.”

“But ma’am!” Poe says, which elicits another laugh from Leia, one that now feels like a slap. “ _Leia_. What do you think a cadet who’s being shortlisted for a fighter squadron is taught? I’ve known it all my life! Not that it’s the only thing that matter, but that it’s what we do! I’m a pilot, it’s what fleet pilots do. Kill, get killed. Sacrifice themselves. It’s damn incredible that I’ve passed thirty. I know it. I’ve accepted it.”

“Oh. You don’t want to live?”

“That’s my life. I – I get to fly, don’t I? I love it. Even these other missions of yours –”

“But would you ask it of others?”

 _Paige_.

_Finn. Rose._

“That’s what we do,” he repeats, but he’s not so convinced. He should have weighted the price they were paying, should have told them…

“Is it adrenaline? Is that what you think you’re all looking for?”

“No! No, it isn’t, it’s the way we serve, it’s – alright, adrenaline, too.” Adrenaline, action, reaction, these moments when you know you move exactly in sync with the whole Galaxy.

“It’s Shara. Isn’t it? You’re older than she ever was, now.”

“ _Force_ , Leia!”

She’s teaching, he knows it, but she also wants a hit because she’s hurt and needs to lash out.

“Sorry.”

He’s never liked when people try to explain everything by who your parents were or what they lacked. He’s an adult with a brain able of rational decisions, whatever Leia or Holdo could think. And if there ever was someone who influenced his choices beyond his own conviction of doing the right thing, it’s Leia. Not his parents, as much as he loves them.

He feels her thumb stroke the back of his hand.

“It’s strange,” she says after a while. “I tried to reach across and touch Ben’s mind after he turned, with all the strength they said I had. I prayed the Force – yes I know it doesn’t work this way. I even begged Han to bring him back, may he ever forgive me. But I never woke up with Ben’s name in my mouth.”

“His name’s Kylo Ren now,” Poe spits. He should feel sorry. He’s only vindicated.

 “Yes. And you’re not the man to whom I should have brought this up. I’m sorry.”

She’s leaning more heavily against his back so he twists a little to accommodate the curve of her head. There’s a pin digging into the crook of his shoulder.

“Poe, this motion with your hand to your forehead, like you’re doing now. Is it from Kylo Ren?”

His hand was up again. Does he do it that often? His laughter sounds hollow.

“Possibly,” he says. “The headache’s gone now, but Force, did it hurt.”

“He’s not in your head right now, is he?”

Is that possible? The disgust at the idea is nearly too much.

“No,” he says, reassured to _know_ , right at the same time, that his mind is really his. “Just an evil memory. I might feel a little wobbly from too many ships exploding near me, though. My ears are still ringing.”

“Indeed? You _were_ shouting more than usual today, I noticed.”

“And you?” he asks out of a sincere need to know, coupled with wanting to get as far as possible from any Kylo Ren talk. “How do you feel, after –?” He can’t bring himself to say aloud what they all witnessed. It was too otherworldly, too impossible, too inhuman. He’s realising Force users scare him when he sees them at work too closely.

She shivers. “I couldn’t leave you all,” she only says. She doesn’t elaborate.

“I’m glad,” Poe says.

“But one day I won’t come back. I feel like the last relic from ancient times, even more now that Luke –”

“No, don’t –”

“The thing is, Poe. You aren’t just a pilot we send up in space when the need arises.”

“I know, I know. Got the point. Lost my ship anyway. Does it always feel so heavy? This seeing the whole picture business?”

“Now more than before. It’s worse than I ever – I don’t know. It’s age speaking, I guess. Losses. That’s why the Resistance needs people like you. Young, hopeful... You still see a path, don’t you?”

“Ha. Up to the next stop, good enough?”

“ _Tell me you see further than this_.” She doesn’t shout, but his ears ring nonetheless. Or maybe that’s because of the explosions.

Alright. Not the time for banter. “I know what the goal is. I know how to begin. I think we’ve already begun, thanks to your brother, Rey and all the people in this ship. As for what’s in front of us, the key systems, the core worlds, the main mining areas, they’re lost. Maybe for years. Decades. And you know what? I’m guessing that there are a lot of people who aren’t so sad about it over there. But I think the First Order is too myopic to realise what lies beyond them.”

“Oh. You think there are other Force users beyond?”

“I feel they were too focused on one Force user. We were, too, as if the name of Skywalker had been the key to all problems in the Galaxy – no offense meant!”

“None taken.”

“I don’t know if being strong with the Force is enough to hold the power, Galaxy-wide. Or at least that’s when the Force isn’t too present that I can find a function for us regular people, so that’s what I’m focusing on – you know you make me feel like I’m back in school, don’t you? – I mean. The non-human. The oppressed. Like it felt in Yavin in my youth, you remember? The cultures who create and those who make-do with nothing, those who grow things and merge into the cycles of life, who marvel at the universe and at each other, who exchange. Who can unite. Against – against them. Him.” He feels his hand fly to his forehead, makes himself stop. “Hell. I’m telling myself one step at a time, but I see what we have to overcome, and lemme tell you, it’s more daunting than facing a destroyer with just BB-8 and a fighter ship.”

“Not something you can fly against and shoot down, huh.”

“Not really.”

“I knew I was right to trust you, son.” The last she said very low, and again he’s not sure he heard right. He hopes so. Then Leia breaks the moment by groaning and swearing under her breath.

“Damn. My back didn’t ache last time I sat here,” she grumbles.

“You probably didn’t feel the need to sit all twisted and, huh, proper-like,” he says. “If I may say.”

“Oh, you may say. Your hand’s in mine and my head’s on your shoulder, aren’t they?”

“Well, then why don’t you lie down if sitting up is uncomfortable? I’m told my thighs make a decent cushion.”

“Who said that? Decent, that’s unfair. Your thighs are –” she makes a sort of expanding handwave and utters this small ironical huff with a tilt of her head he so loves. Then she nods. “I’ll take you on the offer, Poe. Thanks.”

Poe can’t say the new position feels more comfortable. But _Leia_ looks more relaxed, especially when he takes off his jacket and rolls it to cushion the step between the bench and his legs. That’s all good.

And so he has to put his foot in his mouth, of course.

“Do you think all our ships could have regrouped and jumped to lightspeed before that destroyer’s cannons finished loading and shot the Raddus?” he asks. “When I was done goading Hux?”

Seems he does want that debrief, after all. And the lashing that’s sure to come. He feels Leia tense.

“General?” he adds, because he’s an idiot. She has her head on his lap and yet she still feels intimidating.

“Still a sore point, Captain?” she asks. “You disobeyed orders.”

“You’ve counted on me disobeying orders in the past,” he says, unable to hold the bitterness in. “More than once.”

“Not this time! Dammit, Poe, I’ve counted on you _using your head_ before! Not disobeying orders for the beauty of it! That’s a behaviour you wouldn’t accept from any of your pilots!”

He could count on her finding the source of his guilt, right away. “Finn bypassed my orders,” he says. “On Crait. I hated that. By the stars, it was –”

“Horrible, wasn’t it?”

“Horrible. I thought he was dead for sure. For nothing. I don’t understand why –”

And he’ll have to go to Rose post-haste, to – do what? Thank her for Finn’s life although he’s got no right to do? Mop her brow and give her, what, how would he find flowers on the Falcon? Offer her a bunch of Porg feathers? Do these critters only have feathers?

“Then you know how I felt,” Leia says, cutting his train of thoughts. “I think most of our ships would have jumped. The Raddus and the frigates for sure, the fastest fighters and bombers too. The shuttles were already all in. We’d have had losses, but not as heavy as what your attack cost us.”

“But… ?” Poe says, hoping she’ll continue his thought.

“You want me to say it, don’t you? All right. ‘ _But_ ,’ with the lightspeed tracker they put on our tail, at the precise moment we exited hyperspace the destroyer would have killed us all.”

Poe nods. Leia shakes his head.

“But nobody could have seen it at the time,” she says, remnants of her old rage still echoing, metallic, in her voice. “Not me. Certainly not you. Don’t tell me you shut me off the comm because you had weighted all the pro and cons. You just wanted to add a destroyer to your kills.”

“I wanted to show them that it wasn’t because we were smaller that we weren’t dangerous!”

“For sure. And the next time they’d have upgraded their tactics and we’d have been less dangerous, even smaller, and even deader.”

“Sometimes,” Poe insists like the fool he is, “you have to fight even though you know you can’t win.”

“For honour?” She doesn’t sound thrilled by the idea.

“Call it that if you want. So that you remain yourself until the end. Or maybe because there might be survivors and bystanders for whom it will mean a lot that you stood up against the bullies.”

“Headstrong, Amilyn called you,” Leia muses. He feels her neck slacken against his thigh. “That you are. Tell you what, _Captain_. This is not the time to fight for posterity. Yet. And something else: it’s true what they say, that you _are_ a luck magnet.”

Poe can’t help the grunt. It sounded anguished, he feels ashamed to realise.

“If I was a luck magnet, Finn and Rose’s plan, the plan that _I_ enabled, would have worked! The Force knows we needed it!”

“One-in-a-million chances are just that, Poe. Sometimes we have to try. Most often they fail. Oh, I know it feels obscene saying it now, _luck_. But if you hadn’t disobeyed me, _for doubtful reasons_ , we’d be all dead. So thank you.”

Her hand goes up, caresses his jaw. He really needs to shave. She goes on. “It was a lapse, Poe. I _know_ you’re better than this. I’ve seen you lead on Crait. And we’re damn lucky your lapse was exactly what we needed. I’ll even acknowledge that the bombers’ sacrifice and your stunt against the cannons rallied the survivors and even some bystanders, if I heard the comms right.”

“That stunt cost me Holdo’s trust! And with it… I disobeyed _her_ , too.”

“Ha. You disliked her from the start. Oh, don’t look so affronted! Didn’t you?”

“You weren’t there!”

“I knew her well. I know you. Enough to guess.”

Dead heroes deserve to be acknowledged. Poe tries.

“She sacrificed herself for the Resistance. She was loyal, and courageous. She was able to keep a cool head and think of a sound plan. She saw everything I was too far up my own ass to see.”

“And you’re still seething about the way she treated you.”

Poe allows himself to remember. Her aloof stance, her glacial stare, the way her speeches to the crew dealt them platitudes and no facts at all. He tries a light laughter that sounds fake.

“She made me feel so much like that coarse boy from the outer rim, the one you trust with a wrench but not with strategy,” he says. “Like it was back in navy school. Force I hated that kind of officers.”

He thinks some more. She was loyal. Bright. Hated Stormtroopers and the First Order like the best of them. She had no reason to distrust him that much, Yavin-born or not. Then he remembers the Finalizer. Being unconscious on that chair, that droid torturing him and doing who knows what else? And Kylo Ren in his head, tumbling down all his defences.

“The tracker,” he says, jumping half up, hitting his head on the ladder and startling Leia. “The lightspeed tracker. There had to be a spy. She thought it was me? That they did something to me when I got caught? Is that why she didn’t tell anybody anything? Didn’t tell _me_ anything? Oh no. No, no, no! Leia, tell me I didn’t set up that tracker! They couldn’t have done that to me! _Fuck_. Finn told me they condition their Stormtroopers. Could they make me do things, I don’t know, in my sleep? You said Kylo Ren could be in my head. Leia, please, tell me it can’t – No!”

Leia sits up, facing him, and takes his face in her hands. He’s surprised she’s not making a shushing sound. Her eyes are very brown boring into his own – he’s always liked the colour – and nearly too intense.

“Are you looking into my head?” he asks with an involuntary recoil.

“I would never,” she says. “Never.”

Her tone is so definite and so cold that it pulls him back in the moment and grounds him, and that’s when he really sees the grief in her eyes. And when he knows that the comfort that she’s been needing, that he’s felt so unable to give, is finally something he can find inside himself.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” he says, pulling her to him. “I’m sorry for your son. I know you loved him.”

“I did.”

“Some people you love and you can’t help. I’m sorry.”

“Thank you, Poe.”

She’s breathing heavily against his chest and he lets the moment stretch on. Reality will catch up with them soon enough.

“If there’s even a remote chance that I’m their mole, I have to go,” he says finally. He doesn’t think he is. He doesn’t feel any different – beside the grief. He knows he kept fighting the First Order with all he had. If his decisions weren’t sound, it’s because of his lack of judgement, not because they influenced him – or is it?

“I don’t think you are,” Leia says. “I’d accept the risk. The spy was at work before you were captured or they wouldn’t have known about D’Qar on time. Besides, you didn’t touch nor approach the Raddus before you landed in it with Black One. And we made sure there was nothing physical implanted in you when you came back.”

“And if Kylo Ren…”

“Kylo Ren. No. Listen, Poe. Even if controlling a mind distantly is feasible, if you feel your mind is yours then he isn’t in there. That boy always needed everyone to acknowledge his achievements. If he was in, you can be sure he’d be bragging.”

“How can you be sure he’s not bragging inside?”

“I’d know.”

“Holdo couldn’t. I mean know I wasn’t compromised. She said I had sent a Stormtrooper away when I spoke about Finn and Rose. I’m sure she thought –”

“Vice-Amiral Holdo thought her plan needed secrecy.”

“And that prevented her to tell us we had a destination, even if she couldn’t reveal how and when? Instead of just babbling vague metaphors about hope?”

“I’m sorry. Amilyn Holdo was – Force. Amilyn Holdo was a friend, one of the very few I had in the Imperial Senate, one who was sympathetic to our cause, and as you saw she didn’t waver. So what I’m going to say… Ah. Mind if I lie down again? Your thighs do feel comfortable.”

“Sure.”

The Senate. He remembers her impeccable class, her crisp diction. Of course.

Leia clears her voice “So. What I’m going to say isn’t to demean her, it’s – oh, hell. I’m about to badmouth a dead friend. In the hope you understand her.”

“The Senate, huh.”

“Some of us in the Resistance are – were born privileged. You guessed she was. Oh, her world wasn’t particularly attracted to the Dark, rather the opposite. But they were passive, absorbed in the delicacies of their perfect life. She thought about it and what’s so wonderful about her is that she came to the conclusion she had to do more. She had the right ideas, Poe, even though she wasn’t directly impacted by the evilness of the Empire. And she acted upon them.”

“But?”

“But. She heard about Finn and called him a Stormtrooper. She called you Hotshot and Flyboy and _adored_ you because you were _such_ an embodiment of reckless, instinctive fighting. You were so _romantic_.”

“Yeah, well, commanding a wing or even a squadron asks for a little more than _instinct_.”

“Yes, but she’d been brought up to think people fit into categories. Oh, as an adult, she understood it was wrong. But understanding and _feeling_ are different things, you see what I mean? Coarse Outer Rim boy? A category. Brainwashed Stormtrooper, another. Ground technician. Hotshot, Flyboy. And none of these have what it takes to be a leader, a strategist. She wouldn’t have trusted you with her plan and she wasn’t able to listen to what you had to say, which it seems you correctly guessed. Just as she didn’t trust the crew.”

“Didn’t she realise, trust or not, that the crew had to be included somehow? You – you’re not like that. You were brought up the same and – _fuck_ , there’s something called empathy and thank the Force it has nothing to do with upbringing!”

“Maybe a little,” Leia says, sounding far away. Then her whole face contracts into something painful. “But not always.” Somehow, Poe’s hand has wedged itself in the crook of her shoulder, and she covers it with hers. “Anyway that’s how she was. I’m sorry you two were so-- incompatible. We all have our shortcomings.”

What are Poe’s own? A problem with authority, certainly. When it’s not Leia. Trouble reining himself in and not following his impulses? He understands he has to think about the big picture, but does he _feel_ it?

“I trusted the people here with the choice of the Falcon’s touchdown,” Poe says, wondering about spies and an all-knowing Kylo Ren.

“Do you feel comfortable about it?”

Poe grimaces. “Comfortable? No. To be honest, I know my history with spies isn’t great. But I still think that if a spy was dumb enough to stay with us when they thought us cornered then they’ve got as many chances as anyone else to be dead by now. What worries me is how recognisable and _traceable_ a ship the Falcon is.”

“Yes,” Leia nods. “Han said so too.”

“Rey, Chewbacca and I have set up meeting points with Pava, Wexley and the others before we reach our goal. I’m thinking of scattering the survivors some of the ships we still have.  The others will scout ahead and at worse if it’s a trap then our enemies will only get the Falcon and a skeleton crew.”

“And not Rey. They can’t have Rey.”

“Yeah. Although she won’t like it. She’s our real hope, isn’t she? Her, _you._ The Force users. We’re just decoys.”

“ _Don’t say that_. _We_ are what remains when the mighty Jedi come back.”

“You’ll tell her? That she can’t stay?”

“I will.” she sighs. “I wish I had been there when you and Amilyn clashed.”

A vision of a drifting, frost-covered Leia makes Poe shiver. He shifts to cocoon her better, wonder if it’s his imagination or if she’s truly radiating cold.

“You were there,” he whispers into her hair. “I still don’t know how it was possible. Leia, you – by the Force, you _came back_.”

“I should have done better. Felt him, Ben, earlier. Poe my son, Forces showups aren’t what’s important. I should have been awake!”

“You were there. You’re still here. That’s what matters.”

“Force tricks like that, they drain you. They kill you. Luke died this way, it was never Ben! He projected himself on Crait, only an image, but so real that I could feel the warmth of his hands. Took more strength than he had.”

She _is_ cold and Poe fights not to let the panic rise.

“Are you drained? Leia, are you –” dying? Dead? A Force ghost already?

“Tired and cold,” Leia says with a smile that’s wobbling a little. “And worried about the price I’m going to pay. I wish I knew more, or at least that Luke had thought to send me some of his books.”

“Stay with me,” Poe says, gathering her closer. “Stay.”

“Yes,” she says, and maybe she feels already a little warmer.

 

After a while, he realises he’s humming a song, some kind of lullaby.

“Is it one of Shara’s?” Leia asks.

“One of Kes’s. Shara was loving and demonstrative, but not very tender.”

“Poe?”

“Yes?”

“There should be a blanket under the seat. Han was –”

“I know, resourceful.”

“Sometimes.”

“Sometimes.”

The blanket is warm and not as musty as he feared. He wraps Leia in and watches her skin tone shift slowly from unearthly green to rosy.

She twists up, raises an eyebrow, waits for his nod. They kiss on the mouth.

It’s the most tender, least sexual kiss he ever shared.

“I’m still grieving Han,” she says.

He smiles. “I’m still in love with Finn.”

“Foolish boy.”

“Believe me I know.”

He helps her lie down again. After a while, she sleeps, her head on his jacket. _Mother_ , he’d like to say, and he know Mama Shara would approve of the address if not of the kiss. Still, it’s not exactly that.

He kisses her on the cheek and climbs up the ladder as silently as he can.

“General,” he whispers.


	2. Rey

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Teachings about navigation and the darkness within.

When the Falcon exits hyperspace, it lurches very distinctively. It almost feels as if you were lagging behind, there and here at the same time for a quarter of second, just the time to wonder.

“Do you feel it?” Rey asks Chewbacca, who’s checking the stars outside against the map. He doesn’t, so it must be something he’s used to, not a consequence of her bypassing the compressor as she feared. The hypoblastic coupling, maybe? She could lift it just a hairbreadth up? The trouble is, lift it more than a hair and half the ship remains behind, for good.

And if it’s an old quirk then it’s not dangerous, not even that disorientating, is it?

Or maybe it’s just her, her and the Force. It makes her feel there and here at the same time, too. She looks up at the canopy. Now that the sky is back to black she can see her reflection in the permaplex, just the same as what looked back at her from the polished rock on Ahch-to. Herself. Maybe a little plumper in the cheeks already, which she likes – plump in the cheeks, that means successful.

 _Could I be a clone_ , she wonders. _Is that why I was shown only myself. Did we – did_ I _misunderstand the vision?_

It’s nice, thinking that someone wanted something in her so much – liked old her so much that they made a new her. Nearly as nice as having special parents from a special elsewhere.

_I’m myself and that’s enough. My own hopes. My own goals. That’s enough. My own friends._

She’ll have to ask Finn how you know who you are when you’re only yourself.

Time to eat? Time to eat. She gets two eggs from the tray they balanced on the armrest, begins to scale one.

“Egg?” she asks

Chewie only sends her a desolate glare.

“What. I thought Wookiees needed a high-protein diet? That’s protein! And I found _condiments_ in the sealed kitchen compartment!”

It earns her a snide comment on porglings and nests.

“That’s food,” she says, unable to hide the chastising tone. “And it alleviates the pressure on our stock of rations. I wonder though, what do Porgs eat?”

No idea, Chewie moans. Some parasites. All the more so that we don’t eat the Porgs.

“Are the shtars, hmph, stars all right?” she asks with her mouth still full.

They are.

“Good ship,” she says with a smile that she addresses somewhere near the middle of the dashboard, where she imagines the Falcon’s – what? spirit? mind? essence? lives. She pats the area where the hands of several generations of pilots polished the plasteel to a shiny, swirly dark grey. Chewie has switched on the automatic tracing and they’re exactly where they should be. “Perfect exit.”

Han used to do that, Chewie informs her. That patting of the dashboard. When he thought he was alone.

She strokes the polished surface again.

“Yeah, perfect exit,” a new voice says at the door. “Congratulations, not easy with a ship that gripes so much on deceleration.”

She felt him arrive, somehow. She thinks she’s more attuned to the Force by the day. Sometimes, with all this life flowing through her, it makes it harder to know who she is – except for the moments when it makes her feel like nobody is like her (but there _is_ one, another—no). And sometimes it makes her less likely to be startled.

“Dameron, here to take my shift and relieve you,” he says with the shadow of a salute to Chewbacca, and an all-around grin. “With your leave, Rey.”

He’s a military man, she knows. She’s seen some officers before all of this – hide and they won’t notice you, that was the saying. But she’s never seen one with this kind of ironical distance.

“Aren’t you a captain, Poe Dameron?” she asks. “Or some other kind of officer rank?”

“Captain if you wish,” he says. “Also a deserter and now a mutineer. So Poe is good.”

His grin is definitely self-deprecating and she can see how the distance between the soldier and the self might even come from some kind of wound. Weirdly, it makes her want to trust him – she can see why Finn seems to care so much.

“You felt the lurch on hyperspace exit, too?” she says. “Told you, Chewie.”

“Definitely. You’re going to up the coupling?”

Chewie’s howl sounds a lot like laughter. He pats, or rather paws quite delicately Poe’s shoulder and informs them he’s going to see if the sonic fresher has some power left.

“The hypoblastic coupling?” she asks. Poe would do it, she feels. Should she? “Don’t think so. Have you seen what calibrating range is left with the patina on the thread?”

“That’s the only way to balance her, though. Why not?”

“Then she keeps griping. I don’t like the alternative.”

“Really? But it would be so easy to  – ah. Yes. You’re right.”

He looks, she thinks, nearly shameful. Then the moment passes and he stretches with a smile that ends in a yawn. He seems marginally more rested – he must have slept – but his lips are somewhat blueish. He lost his jacket somewhere.

“I have a poncho I can lend you if you want,” she says. “Here. Got it from Luke on Ahch-to.”

“Hey, great! Someone’s sleeping on my jacket so, uh – yeah, thanks. Isn’t that ship freezing a little?”

“Tell that to Chewie. I agree but he says that’s because I come from a hot planet.”

“ _Hot_ ,” Poe smirks. “Could say that. Yavin is warm, too. But wet. That’s, uh, where I’m from.”

She finds she’s fiddling with the handful of Jakku sand in her pocket. When she put away her desert attire there was sand left in the folds so she gathered it. Now it tends to seep through the seams but hey, sand gets everywhere, it’s a fact of life. If you’d asked her what she wanted to take from her old place she’d probably have said the doll, but she had no choice, did she? So sand it is, joined now by a three-valved sea-shell and some dried kelp twisted in a ring form that she picked on Ahch-to.

Poe clears his throat. It’s hard to talk like that, she thinks. To a man. Although she feels safe with him. When she found them on Crait Finn was standing very close to him and held his hand, and they both looked – like dawn on the dunes, maybe. Tender, full of light. She finds endearing that Finn likes so much to hold hands, although maybe not Rose’s. (She knows it’s mean. She held Ben’s hand. _Across thousands of lightyears._ )

“Do you like to hold hands, too?” she asks Poe. He starts, then very much looks like a sunrise this time, red flowing up from his neck to his cheeks to his hairline. “Oh. Sorry?”

That makes him laugh. “Talk of awkward –” he begins. “You were thinking of Finn? Ah. I’m not sure he’s aware – uh. We aren’t very good at small talk together, are we?”

She snorts. “Ah. No?”

“Let’s get to business, then? So, what’s the schedule. We’ve got some twelve hours of navigating the outskirts of the cloud gas before we reach Daralhaya point, haven’t we?”

“I guess,” Rey answers, annoyed to feel so inadequate. “I was following Chewbacca’s plotted route. I don’t really know how to navigate beyond selecting pre-recorded lanes from the ship’s comp.”

“You don’t?” Poe exclaims, with what looks like genuine surprise. “With the way you pilot?”

“A lot of the piloting was Chewbacca’s. During the Crait attack, I held the guns.”

And it was so beautiful from above, she thinks. And so terrible. Red lines on white, red craters, like a map, like slashes and wounds revealing the planet’s flesh and blood. Red splotches giving way to black at the door, and Luke there but not there in the middle. She shivers.

“But you were piloting when we exited right now?”

“I was. that’s routine, though.”

“Rey, everyone who’s a pilot knows the Falcon’s manoeuvrability to mass ratio is so dreamy she’s on par with a warship and that her quirks are such a nightmare they could kill the average pilot. If you got her out of hyperspace so well, then you’re an outstanding one.”

“Thank the Force I didn’t know that when Finn and I stole her then. I thought it was just an antique with corroded circuits. Although now that I’m thinking of it, the alluvial damper –”

“You _stole_ her?”

“From Unkar Plutt who won it from the Irving Boys who stole it from Ducain who stole it from Han. And then Han caught us.”

Poe bends forward to stroke the same polished area she touched before. “She’s led a colourful life, hasn’t she?” He turns back to her, eyes disbelieving. “And you don’t navigate?”

She shrugs. “My experience with ships comes from an old simulator and the crashed T-65s I tried to build back up.”

“…Build? T-65s?”

“What else do you think I could have found on Jakku? Didn’t always work, though.”

“… Always.” Poe’s grin is acquiring a slightly manic quality. “Lemme tell you, there are people in the scouting squadrons that are going to love meeting you. Hm. So. Got some theoretical knowledge of the Galaxy workings? Of hyperspace? What’s your math level? Looks like our friend the cloud gas down here is well-behaved enough that we can begin a nav lesson, what do you think?”

“Yes!” she can’t help shouting. “I mean, yes to the nav lesson, and also yes I know how the Galaxy works, as for maths I did what I could with the books I could find on Jakku, I don’t know about levels?”

“Hey, good,” he says, stretching again in the copilot seat – the cockpit is more spacious than a starfighter will ever be and she thinks he’s stealthily testing out the headspace. “Let’s begin.”

 

Working with Poe feels relaxing. She doesn’t know if he’s a good teacher, because he tends to ask her to do things above her understanding, watch her fumble, finally realise where’s the catch, apologise and explain. But he’s an appreciative and enthusiastic one, talking about gravity wells with literal stars in his eyes. As he goes on, navigating through space becomes less of a mean to go from one world to another and more like merging into the fabric of the universe.

 _All is linked_ , she thinks at the same time as she feels a dizzying urge to reach across, or maybe to stand up and run to the Jedi books she took with her. _Navigation isn’t what I should be learning, that’s just skimming on the top of_ _an ocean of power – no. Not power. Of_ being.

But it grounds her. She finds she can talk about a lot of things with Poe, now that the initial awkwardness has gone. They could go on for hours about ships mechanics, where she thinks she’s got the advantage, and about droid AIs in general and BB-8 in particular, where Poe turns into a mix of mad scientist and doting father and becomes hard to follow. He tells her about the green on his homeworld and she’s surprised that she can extricate some good memories from Jakku to answer, memories about auntie Qamar, end-of-dismantling feasts or sledding on dunes.

And it feels like they keep wanting to go back to Finn.

“When you stole the Falcon,” Poe says in a lull. “You took Finn out of Jakku and saved his life. And again on Starkiller. I never thank— I mean, Force, I’m so glad you were there.”

“ _You_ saved his life when you got him out of that First Order ship.”

He smiles, then grimaces. “And he saved mine when he got me out of that chair. And then I sent him to a near certain death, twice.”

“And Rose saved him,” Rey says, hearing how forlorn she sounds.

He touches her arm, light enough that she doesn’t recoil, and seems a little wistful when he says: “Finn has a lot of room for love in his heart. You’re still in there, you’ll see.”

Rey repays him with an even lighter touch to the shoulder. “You, too,” she tries.

It only makes him look at her with a kind of sad asymmetrical smile, which she echoes, and then one of them guffaws and it makes them both laugh aloud.

“Yeah. Finn,” Poe says.

“Finn.”

“I wonder how Stormtroopers –” Poe begins – “did you know, I mean, did he tell you that the First Order takes them as babies? I wonder how they’re raised up. How much they can…”

She didn’t know. She realised that Finn had no parents, of course she did, and now she wonders why she didn’t dig some more. Stormtroopers, in the mind of most of the Galaxy’s sentients and apparently in hers as well, are a category of their own, hive-like, never too individual, too small, to young – or too old. Now the idea of little kids in white helmets is heartbreaking, and the image of these impeccable dark-uniformed officers she saw in the Finalizer tearing babies from their families and moulding them to those white armours, breaking them into machines, makes her physically heave.

Ben wore one of these perfectly tailored black outfits, oh how she saw the tailoring. Ben struggled with a heritage that was too heavy, suffered from gifts as tainted as her own. Ben was dragged into his destiny by adults who chose for him. And Ben chose, willingly, to rule over an order that turns people into things.

Stormtroopers always walk very close to each other – who else could they count on?

“I think,” she says finally, “I think the Stormtroopers aren’t as broken as you could fear. Finn cared for me. He’s got more compassion than many of the people I dealt with on Jakku.”

Poe smiles and it lights up his face. “Yeah.”

“Their life can’t be all about conditioning, they must have some kind of underground thing going… He knows about boyfriends, see?”

“ _Boy_ friends?”

She chuckles. “One of the first things he asked me was whether I had a boyfriend.”

“Oh.” He clears his throat again. “So. Do you have one?”

“No.”

She probably sounded too final because the awkwardness is there again. She concentrates on the ship’s commands, not that they need to.

 

Until they do.

“Careful,” Poe says. “Cloud gas is about to become less friendly. Ionisation light on our eight, coming our way.”

“Saw it.”

She alters the course, steep enough – the Falcon really answers like no other ship, -- sees the other tendril of dangerous, beautiful light burst and reach to them and Poe’s body brace, bend and straighten, not in anticipation of a collapse but of her move. The ship swivels and plunges under her hand, swift, steady – shocks behind her, some dull, some sharp, a few shouts.

“Damn,” she says between clenched teeth. “Did we strap up Rose and the other wounded?”

“Yeah,” Poe breathes, his right hand, the closest to the main command, twitching up then going back down to lie flat on the polished area. “Yeah we did. Damn, on your right! _Fuck_.”

An acceleration and a tight swerve to dodge a last surge of light, and a deceleration that she tries to make a smooth as possible. They’re out.

They look at each other. Breathe.

“Everybody all right in there?” Poe yells.

“A few hits, nothing serious!” someone answers, the girl with the tight buns, Rey thinks. “What happened? Is the ship okay?”

“Rey just got us out of a tricky gas show! Ship’s doing great.”

Poe looks back at Rey. “You’re good,” he says, then jerks up his hand in a repeat of his earlier twitch. “Sorry about that. Not used to watching.”

Rey smiles. “Feels definitely easier with commands in hands in a case like this. Phew. That was scary. I’m going to give the cloud a wider berth, alright with you?”

She keys in the new route, feeling Poe’s eyes on her work the whole time.

“Definitely alright,” Poe answers. “What are a few hours more before entering lightspeed compared to being roasted like a crispy Porg?”

“You tried?”

“What?”

“Roasting Porgs.”

“Porg-like birds, definitely. When I still had the time for visits to Yavin. Used to taste good.”

“Chewbacca disapproves.”

“No open fires on a ship anyway.”

“Yeah,” Rey breathes out wistfully.

 

They bask for a while in shared carnivorous lust. Rey closes her eyes, feeling her heart rate slow down, unwillingly expanding her awareness in the way Luke showed her.

Poe, she realises, felt very much _here_ while she was piloting around the gas scare – one with the Force, balancing himself along with her and the Falcon. Now he’s still right beside her but he feels remote, muted like most of the people on this ship. She longs for a true connexion, someone with her strength and her purpose, like Luke could be, like Ben… She forces herself to breathe out.

“Rey, are you all right?”

Her eyes open and it’s like a very short brutal fall. She nods.

“You – you sort of lifted everything that was loose in the cockpit up in the air,” Poe says, sounding choked. “The corners of the poncho, your hair, that scarf of yours, eggs…”

“Oh, no,” Rey says. There are egg yolks on the floor amidst bits of shell. “lifting things…”

“Hey, it’s all right. Lifting things, like rocks, is a useful skill to have.”

It’s not all right. His hand is on her arm again, maybe with more pressure than before, and she doesn’t know if it grounds her back or if she wants to push it away – with her mind. And he’s not all right either, she thinks, with the way he’s touching his forehead with the tip of his fingers, the crease between the eyebrows deepening.

If she hadn’t met Snoke she wouldn’t see it, wouldn’t understand. For her, Kylo Ren – _Ben_ was easy to keep out, or if not easy to counterattack. But Snoke extracting everything about Luke from her head felt like ice cold, black, dirty slime invading her mind, unstoppable, disgusting, _painful_. Something abhorrent, criminal, unforgivable.

She knows where Poe was when Finn found him, what was done to him. What _Kylo Ren_ did. How could you be comfortable with the Force after that, if you have no way to fight it back?

“No, really,” Poe repeats. “It’s okay. Rey, you look very far away? Why are you touching your head like that? _Fuck_. Oh, fuck, he dug into your mind, too. When you were up there. Did he? Kylo Ren?”

“Oh,” she hears herself say. “Oh. Yes. It hurt. Did not matter in the end, what he saw, but – hurt. No. Not Kylo Ren. Snoke. _Snoke_ did.”

She feels his revulsion as much as she witnesses it.

“No. Oh no, Rey! That must – I’m so sorry! How are you still – how did you manage to get yourself out of _that!_ ”

She laughs a little, or tries to. She sees disgust in his eyes, and relief, and awe, and well-hidden but still there, fear. “That’s all right” – but nothing is – “Snoke’s dead.”

“ _You killed Snoke?_ ”

Ben – “Kylo Ren did.” _I helped him. Does Poe need to know that?_ “And then he took his place. I guess. We – sort of fought. I didn’t wait to witness it.”

Poe is half standing now. She won’t say more, she thinks. There are limits to what he can hear. And then she’s tight in his arms and she doesn’t want to break free. She finds she’s crying.

“I don’t understand,” Poe whispers very close to her ear. “All of this. It’s – you probably do. But we can survive this. You can. It gets better. Promise, Rey.”

She’s afraid she’s dripping snot into his hair, lets out a hiccupping breath. “I failed,” she says.

Poe guffaws, no mirth in it. “You? Of everyone here, I’d say you’re the only one who succeeded. Or we wouldn’t be here.”

“I should have brought Ben back. I thought, no, I _felt_ he was not so far gone to the dark side. Less than Vader, I was so sure! And then I couldn’t.”

He tenses. “Wouldn’t know how to grade that kind of fall. But Kylo Ren is twisted beyond repair. Has been for a long time.”

She thinks he can’t see what she saw. She thinks he’s right. She pushes him slowly at arm’s length. Maybe she needs to see his eyes.

“I don’t know what I should have done,” she says. “I’m – Poe, I’m sorry – I’m alone. Even Luke said he couldn’t take the First Order all by himself, and now there’s just me. People here, they watch me with those eyes, look at me like – I don’t want to feel like they’re so remote, different, so –”

\-- far below?

“Rey. You’re one of us. I’ll be here to show you nav tricks. Or you could tell me all about hypoblastic coupling. If it helps.”

She’s sort of able to smile. “It helps. But who’s—” like me? – “going to tell me what I should do?”

Poe sighs, and then smiles. “There is another,” he says. “That’s how the story goes, and now I’ve seen it.”

“ _What?_ ”

“Leia, of course.”

“Oh.”

She knew, probably.

He gulps, shivers. “Command deck got blown by the First Orders fighters earlier today in the Raddus. Uh. Yesterday. I Couldn’t do anything, couldn’t even fly up to meet them. Everyone from High Command, Akhbar, Statura, Leia, _everyone_ got sucked off into space. _She came back_. Floated in. No equipment, nothing, in the void. Alive.”

Rey has read some of Luke’s Jedi books. This is about levers and finding balance in the Force. She doesn’t think she can even comprehend reaching out to what must have amounted to half the galaxy, and then applying pressure, so wide, so focused.

“But why?” She breathes out. “Why was Luke so important then? If General Organa could do this?”

 

 

“Because,” Leia Organa says from the door, “I didn’t have a single idea of what I was doing and I still don’t.”

Rey thought she’d see awe on Poe’s face. She sees tenderness.

“Leia,” he says, which surprises her. She imagined Leia Organa would be _General_ to her officers. “And so you happened to pass by here right in time for maximum effect.”

“Of course not. I’ve been standing here for a while, since the ship gave us such a shake actually. I thought you both were doing great as a mutual support system and didn’t want to interrupt.”

Poe stretches, flashes a smile and squares himself in his seat. He looks cockier, younger, more whole. Leia huffs and Rey sees it’s a game they’re both playing. She’s wearing Poe’s jacket, she notices.

“Sorry for the shake. How are you?” Poe asks, unable to mask his worry completely. “Slept well?”

“Ah. Better, thank you. Yes, I slept.”

This is an old woman, Rey reminds herself. Older than Auntie Qamar when she died, probably, no, certainly, because desert life ages you fast. But trying to balance your own life in the Force does, too. She stands up.

“Would you like to sit down?” she asks.

“Actually, yes. Poe, give me your seat?”

“But Ma’am,” Poe says – so it’s not always Leia. “The Falcon needs –”

“A copilot, and do you think it’s something I never did with Han? Although he used to say my arms were too short. Ha! As if his weren’t as well. Chewie is the only one whose arms are long enough to reach all the switches here.”

“Yeah!” Rey can’t help adding. “Mine too!”

Poe grins, nods and stands up. He and Leia touch each other’s arm when they exchange places. Rey wouldn’t know how to call such a relationship, but she’d like to have this with someone.

“I’ll leave you then,” Poe says, which surprises Rey. Does it feel too easy? Rehearsed maybe? “Rey, hold on. Come talk to us when you’re not on duty anymore, I mean Finn and, uh, me, and all the others.”

As Poe slides off from the dashboard area, Rey catches his side-eye to his jacket on Leia’s shoulders. He sees her watching, smirks and holds up a fold of the poncho with a questing expression.

“Keep it,” Rey says, and then, because he looks comically pyramidal in it: “it suits you.”

She’s not sure she’s parsing the twitch of his mouth right.

 

The Falcon is Leia’s. Not as much as it was Han’s, but Rey sees the same familiarity in the way she settles down, and how the copilot seat has an indent precisely at the level of her head.

“By the Stars,” Leia says. “Such a long time. Everything looks the same. As dingy and patched up as ever. The dice are missing, though.”

She’s crying. And then she doesn’t.

“I’m sorry,” Rey says.

“Yes. I am too. What a mess we made. Although not you, Rey. Not you.”

Rey would like to tell her about all the mess she made, herself, personally. And maybe also spew off everything about Luke’s failure, to see if Leia knew, or if not to see if she really is the only person who could hear it, believe her, and still love him. But Luke just died and turned himself into an icon of their fight. Maybe Rey can’t force others to share the weight of remembering the man behind the legend, with his failures, his courage and his heart.

Leia presses her mouth in something like a self-deprecating, kind of fatalistic smile, and produces a thermo-jug and two cups. The tea inside is Yarba, the same Luke enjoyed, is also scalding, and stronger than Luke ever did it. No sugar. Leia downs it like she drank it all her life and pours herself a second cup. Rey is still blowing on her first to try to cool it down at least under damaging levels of heat.

“So,” Rey decides to ask. “What is it you have to tell me that Poe didn’t want to be here for?”

“Ah,” Leia says, rising her third cup in a salute. “The Resistance, or what’s left of it, has plans.”

“I thought we just were going to hide somewhere?”

“Oh, we are. And then there’ll be a lot of unglamorous work to build something back up. The kind that hinges on communication, charm, money scams, and good use of symbols. And _you_ are a symbol now, Rey. The best we have. So, what Poe didn’t want to be here for is that our plan implies that you lose your freedom to chose where you go. We need to make sure you stay alive, and so you can’t stay on the Falcon.”

“ _What?_ ”

“We’ll disperse in various ships at the first meetpoint. The Falcon is too traceable, and will go on to our final destination with a skeleton crew as a scout. Or as bait.”

“But I can help! I can –”

“You can help by being alive, Rey.”

“Is this an order?”

Leia sighs. “It should be. Although I’m beginning to doubt my ability to give orders in any useful manner.”

“Wait. Wait, and Finn? Where is he going? Do you think you can choose for him too?”

“We haven’t talked yet. Finn is a symbol too, of course. An incredible asset to undermine the First Order. So yes. Maybe he should go with you. As for choosing for him, I think that he’d bow to the Resistance’s needs now. After some arguing, because with the way he looks up to Poe, he’s learning with the best masters.”

“Should he be forced to join? When I last talked with him, he was – ah. Not sure.”

“He is now. It’s – I don’t know. Something that happened when he was with Rose, strengthened alongside Poe and then crystallised into the rallying speech we all needed on Crait. Oh yes, he’s with the Resistance.”

Rey want to run to Finn and tell him he’s mad and simultaneously wants to jump and hug him again. She’s so frightened he will have freed himself from the First Order only to die a hero in some Resistance's last stand - and now she truly understands the value of Rose’s sacrifice.

“I’m glad,” is what she settles for. “And Poe? You’ll pull him out of the line of fire too?”

“Oh by the Force. Are you going to ask me about all the people you care for here?”

“Yes! If you’re going to make me wait on the side, at least don’t make me worry for my friends!”

Leia folds on herself at that. Her hands make an aborted gesture to her face, and then fall down to grip the armrests.

“ _Of course_ you’ll worry,” she says, and Rey hears decades of it in her tone. “Although I’m betting you won’t just wait on the side. I’m sure you have a lot to prepare for. I’ve seen these books you took with you.”

“I stole them.”

She smirks. “Good. As for Poe, that’s his job to be on the frontline.”

“But he’s precious to us, too!”

“Immensely.”

“So why should he sacrifice himself!”

“He should never. Oh, he’ll come back. Listen, Rey. Put this man in any ship and throw an army at him, he comes back. Especially now that he’s learned caution. The truth is, if I’m not mistaken Poe Dameron will lead us, sooner or later. And he doesn’t lead from the back, not yet, although I wish he could.”

 

Leia shivers and wraps herself more closely in Poe’s jacket. Her hand goes up to stroke the worn, faded Resistance patch on the left shoulder.

“I knew his mother,” she says, low. “From the last war. She was a pilot too, a good one. Didn’t see him so much when he was little because he mostly stayed with his grandparents, but I still remember he was such a sparkly kid, full of wonder for the world. They had a tree in their backyard, a Force tree, something marvellous that Luke had brought there. He worshipped it! How come we parents make warriors out of our children, Rey?”

Rey doesn’t know. She’s had dreams, yes, brought by the old wreckage of battles against the Empire. She’s played at shooting up Death Stars in crashed T-65s and many of her staffs have been turned into pretend-lightsabers. But other times, she’s imagined herself flying faster and stealthier than anyone past borders and customs, she’s made the Kessel run in less than twelve parsecs, won fortunes. She wasn’t made into a warrior but into a survivor, by parents who were nothing, nobodies who abandoned her. She isn’t made for that world where everyone is a Galaxy leader, the child of some hero or the last scion of a glorious line.

She wants to go find Finn and ask him all about the place to where he was about to flee when she was abducted at Maz’s. A symbol? She’s just a strange kid who lifts rock.

“I’m not a warrior,” she says. “I don’t think you win a war by lifting rocks, not even by tweaking the mind of weaker people. I couldn’t fly across the void like you did and all this Force flow thing doesn’t help against dreadnoughts. Luke was a good symbol. A Skywalker and Vader’s saviour. I’m nothing. Did I tell you? Ben saw it. I have no role in this story.”

“Ben? _Now what did my son tell you._ ”

Leia’s anger has a material quality to it, the potency of the soundwave that destroyers make when entering atmosphere.

“That’s not something he told me, that’s –”

“I’m sure it is.”

“Fine. _We_ both saw that I had no parents. The Force showed us. _He said_ that I was no one, had no place, unless I went with him. I have no destiny. Or if I do, it’s with the Dark side and I prefer to be nothing!”

“And you believed him?”

“I _saw_ it!”

“That your parents weren’t exceptional! Not that you were nothing!”

“Isn’t that the same? How could you know. You’re a Skywalker.”

Rey didn’t think Leia would take this as a hit, but she does, judging by the twist of her mouth and the nostril flare.

“I’m an Organa. Which, granted, is not nothing, but there was no destiny in it. Only two people who chose to love me very much. Luke might have seen Anakin Skywalker as his father. For me, he was a criminal and a murderer, the man who tortured me, tortured my lover, and who blew off my planet. Why would I want to be a part of _that._ ”

“But you’re still Luke’s sister.”

“Not because of destiny! Because I, no, we both chose to cherish that bond. He was – ah. My best and only brother.”

“Ben saw himself as the last Skywalker. I think that's what he offered to share with me.”

Leia’s hands are gripping the dashboards now, and Rey thinks if they weren’t they’d shake, not that much of exhaustion as of an anger that veers on bottled rage.

“The last Skywalker, huh. Amending the errors of his parents who wanted nothing of it. Listen, Rey. Ben, and I do say Ben, not Kylo Ren, because this has nothing to do with a destiny with the Force, whether the dark side or the light, nor with scared kids who disguise themselves with grand names. So, Ben always had that knack for making other people’s stories all about himself. I don’t know why. He was so – such a black hole, this child of mine. So unusual, so brilliant, so brittle. Always needing approval. Demeaning his friends to make himself feel better. Sucking in all the love you could give, wanting always more, or maybe, who knows? We've certainly argued often enough about it, Han and I, it was that I couldn’t give him what he needed.”

“I saw that too,” Rey whispers. “How he begs for love. And how it feels the love you give him is ever falling down, and you never feel it land anywhere.”

Leia’s smile is the saddest thing Rey ever witnessed.

“Did you fall in love with him, kid?”

_Did I?_

“He was my equal,” Rey says, looking for an answer as she talks. “With the same attraction for the Dark. What I could have become, if I had toed out of the line. Maybe, if I had been meaningful for others, offered a Jedi apprenticeship, been tested like he has. If Luke had tried to kill me. I understood him.”

“A deadly thing to try, understanding Ben,” Leia whispers. “But from his mother, thank you, anyway.”

“And he understood me. He was me, a distorted version of myself. So I – I don’t think I fell in love. He was – too close to my own ugliness. I gave him love, yes, because I pitied him, because that’s what I would have wanted had I been him. Leia, it was not enough.”

“I am hating myself for understanding it too late, Rey. And for the consequence. But with Ben, it can’t ever be enough. And I’m not sure he understood you. He just tried to make you a part of him, inhabited with the same greed for power, and the same adoration for himself. I told you, Rey. He sees only himself, and now that he’s an adult I won’t take the responsibility for his actions, nor should you! You didn’t fail. _He_ failed where you succeeded.”

“I was never so close to embrace the Dark. It still calls me. Luke saw how flawed I am. How can you say I succeeded?”

She’s going to cry, or run away, or send the Falcon blindly into hyperspace, anything because she feels trapped, bound, squashed down, twisted and cracked by the weight of her own impulses.

But Leia only laughs, a true, mirthful, strong laughter.

“Have you seen yourself? You came to Kylo Ren because of compassion. You care for people. You’re drawn to Finn. You see who Poe really is beyond the glitter he protects himself with. Tell me. You say you both saw your parents, or rather that they were nobodies. But what did _you_ , Rey, see?”

“Mirrors. In that dark place beneath the island, only the dark only feels like yourself, your own mind. There are no monsters. No emperors. No dead friends. Only what you bring in with you.”

“So, mirrors?”

“My reflection. Or maybe myself, mired in time, so many versions of me. And the shadows that combined to make me.”

“But you knew who was the real you?”

“Of course. The one I chose to be.”

“Yes. That’s the difference between Ben and you. He’d have been lost, unable to decide who he was without someone else to define him. And had there been someone else, then he would have hated them. You’re better than him, Rey.”

“Then help me! Luke wouldn’t, he said I was too strong for him. Are you strong enough? Can you anchor me here? All the others, they’re incomplete, unable to feel the Force, I need something else, someone else, can’t you see I am a freak?”

She nearly yelled. She wants to lash out, doesn’t care if she hurts people in the process – they’re unfinished anyway, dull, blind, even Finn, even Poe, -- sees again the hole in the ground and the dark tendrils rising up to meet her, feels her own mind choke itself in the terrible effort to keep that rage bottled in. She needs help, a hand to pull her out, a buoy.

But Leia doesn’t say anything, doesn’t hug her, doesn’t even give a touch or a smile. She just looks on, mouth pursed and head jutting forward.

“I’m not a Jedi,” Rey spews out. “I have nothing in common with the sweet children of five Luke’s books describe. I’m drawn to the Dark. I killed my first man at twelve.” She’s out of breath with the grip she has on herself to prevent everything in the Falcon from launching up in the air, and sweating from the effort to avoid yelling – the others can’t hear her, not with what she’s saying. “I’m a murderer, like Ben. Like his grandfather.”

“Oh. Did you use the Force to kill that man? Did you use your rage to lash out? Did you feel drunk on power afterward?”

“No. No, of course not! I didn’t know about the Force back then. He was thrashing Qamar, he would have killed her, because she hadn’t brought in clients in the last three days – she was past forty at the time and exhausted, what did he expect? And I couldn’t let him do it, got him down with my staff, squashed his throat with the tip.”

“And did you like it?”

“No. It was terrible. He kept trying to breathe for a long time. I threw up.”

Leia’s eyes are very dark and remind Rey of the underground entrance on Ahch-to. She feels cool, collected, in control, if cool and collected can cohabit with an intensity that could pierce plastisteel.

“Then you are better than me,” Leia says in a toneless, carefully articulated voice. “I’m decent with a blaster, this is the second war I am in. What did you think? My first came when I was older than you but not that much. Nineteen, I’d say. That’s about when I began to be involved more physically in the Rebellion.”

“So what? It was just blaster fire, from afar,” Rey says, not ready to relent.

“You’re right. It was just blasters then, and the occasional throwing up, just like you. But then came Jabba. He had humiliated me, oh, worse than this. And he was about to kill Han and Luke. I didn’t kill him with a blaster, this one. Officially, with my chains. But what gave me the strength and the stamina to keep on, because he was thrashing around and big, a big Huttese lord, was a force I was able to pull from, that I didn’t explain at the time. How I hated him, Jabba. It gave me the power to kill him. And such a high afterwards. Such revenge.”

Ben doesn’t resemble his mother in the slightest. Tall, big lips, strong nose… Except for the eyes. It scares Rey now.

“But you didn’t fall,” she says, surprised of the smallness of her voice.

“I could have right then. It was – like the edge of a blade. Painful to walk on. You want to jump. I think – I think, if Han hadn’t been there, hadn’t survived, for sure I’d have gone to the Dark. But there was Luke to help, Han to heal, all these people that counted on me, held me back…”

“That’s what makes you different from Ben.”

“And it’s the same with you, Rey. Dark side, Light side. It’s not what you’re drawn to. Anger. Even a thirst for power. Many have them, even the purest. Hell, have you seen Poe’s hubris? No – I guess, no, since you haven’t seen him fly, really fly and come down afterwards.”

“But Finn – I see only the Light in him.”

“Do you now? I haven’t seen enough of him for – but yes, maybe. Someone strong enough to resist what he was submitted to, and come laughing and loving to the other side… I’m glad that Poe –”

“You’re glad Poe _what_?”

Leia looks down then sideways. “Ah. Not mine to say, I think. Well, Rey. Going back to the subject at hand. I’m drawn to the dark. Have always been. I hate easily. My anger is always bubbling very close to the surface, I yell at people, I snap. Dammit, I slap my officers. But what is my anger compared to the sufferings of billions of people at the hand of the First Order?”

“So you hold it in.”

“ _As long as I’m alive it won’t free itself_. Yes, I hold it in. And you do, too. That you know there’s darkness inside doesn’t mean you’re incapable of love or that you side with murderers and oppressors.” She turns abruptly and leans forward, eyes flashing. “And this is where I can help. You wanted someone to teach you?”

Rey isn’t so sure anymore that she needs a master. Not Leia, at least. Not someone who seems so close from teaching her a tainted use of the Force, one sliding ever so slowly towards evil.

“That’s what I said, yes,” she tries.

“Because I’m not a Force master. You know more than me about lifting rocks, projecting yourself, what do I know, combat mindsets and lightsaber making. Maybe you could explain me what I did in the void yesterday. Thank the Force you stole these books. What I can teach you, one woman to another, is how _not to use the Force_. How not to get drunk on it.” She blinks and appears to shrink on herself, an old woman again, with puffy eyes and a blueish tint to her lips. “How to remember you’re human. A sentient like them, no more, no less. You’re not above them. They’re not dull or incomplete. Do you think you’re all alone in the Force flow?”

“I – no, of course not. It’s linking together everything that lives, and dies.” That’s what Luke told her, what she felt on Ahch-To, although it’s a but memory now, not the intimate certainty it was then.

Leia closes her eyes and puts her hands in her lap, fingers interlinked, palms up. Her mouth becomes lax and her forehead becomes smooth, but it’s Rey who feels her own heartbeat slow down. It’s movement in the corner of one eye, a tingling sound you’d hear only in perfect silence, the slightest breath. And it’s so powerful Rey wonders if green tendrils are going to sprout out of the wooden parts of her staff, or is porglings are going to hatch from the broken eggs on the floor.

Leia’s voice is lower and even more sandy than usual when she speaks, eyes still closed. “I never tried to be a Jedi. Never learned. I was too old, had a career and a lover, then a child, what did I care about balancing the Force when I had to balance factions in the new Republic? But I know this about my use of the Force: Luke said it was opening me to others. That I did it all the time, even unconsciously, projecting myself towards others. Not to impose my thoughts, no! But to understand theirs. Can you feel it, Rey?”

She thought she’d feel Leia and not much else, so strong is she. But she hears a multitude of voices, neatly enclosed inside the Falcon’s walls. Grief and worry and lust and fear and hope and love. People.

“Do you still think they’re dull? Incomplete? Blind with the Force?”

“No…”

Rey’s voice echoes. Some individualities among the collective mind in the Falcon whisper it back, no no no no no.

“For sure, they might not be able to come back from the void, teleport their image across lightyears, or even lift rocks. Even so. Han could shoot with his eyes closed or behind his back and still hit full target. _And when he made love_ – damn. You heard this too, did you? And when he piloted, it felt like the universe aligned with him, not the opposite.”

“Felt it too with Poe, when I piloted us out of the reach of the gas. He was with me and the ship.”

“Yes. So you know what I mean. And Finn, now. I wonder how much of his empathy is because he opens to others in the Force flow. Blind? No. Strong with the Force, even, maybe. So here it is. Some of us can reach into the flow at will, balance it to their desire. Others only dig instinctively, or in special circumstances. Others yet have to be taught. And some will never be able to learn. But they’re all inside the flow.”

“Yes,” Rey says.

Yes yes yes yes yes yes, voices echo in the collective mind.

Leia opens her eyes.

“Do you still think you have no place in this, Rey?” she asks.

Rey thinks. “No. I have my place, alongside with the others. Maybe that was our mistake? We were so keen to find a saviour, and it was us who had to save ourselves all this time.”

“Poe said something similar not so long ago. Only he thought he wasn’t thinking about the Force. Only about the Resistance.”

Rey feels her heart burst with a kind of hope even Luke didn’t give her. “Isn’t it time to stop opposing the Resistance work and the Force? There will be many Force users. Not Jedi, or not many Jedi, but all kind of people. You’ll help me, Leia?”

Leia reaches across to grip her arm.

“ _Always_.”

It makes Rey shiver a little with the memory of blue-haloed, transparent ghosts in old book illuminations.

Then Leia smiles and she never has looked more alive to Rey.

“And may the Force be with us.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Pratchettian undertones very voluntary. I thought Rey was such a Pratchett character in the movie, and this mirror scene made me wonder whether it was just a common trope or if Rian Johnson had done it as a homage.
> 
> All this dialogue and so little plot! I hope you managed to reach the end without falling asleep. If you did, I would love to hear what you thought. Thanks for reading!
> 
> For those interested in infrequent posting, the occasional fanart and TLJ apology, my [tumblr](https://la-tarasque.tumblr.com/) again.


	3. Finn (part one)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Finn learns about the many kinds of love and experiments with kissing.
> 
> I got carried away with Finn! He's such an apex in TLJ, the character that connects all the others. And since Finn also wanted action, and more Poe than I had initially planned, I had to cut his chapter in two because of length.  
> Second part following shortly today, as soon as I'm done editing.

Yet another of the Falcon’s clangs wakes up Finn for good. He doesn’t remember how he fell asleep, only that he half-woke several times with the ship’s jolts and lurches and each time rolled back, drawn to the security of the wall by fear and guilt and loss, closer to Rose’s alcove. He coughs as he sits up, his tongue thick and even stickier than before with the taste of old blood. Somebody gave him a blanket that is now twisted tight as a rope and wrapped around his chest, pressing hard against cuts and bruises that remind him of his failures.

The throbbing ache in his elbow, radiating to his side? The shock of Rose’s speeder slamming into him. Burns on his hands? The cabin sides were red-hot when he unbuckled, and he felt so angry, guilty, scared for Rose that he didn’t think before grabbing its edge. The crick in his neck, the vague, all-permeating cold and joint ache, his seizing back? His falling asleep on the floor, letting himself being jolted around when he should have kept vigil.

So many faults, all deserving punishment – a good trooper maintains themselves in good shape and is responsible for their own health, always ready to jump for orders, be it to advance or sacrifice themselves, or – _fuck_. He drives his fist into the ground, stealthily – nobody can know he’s harming himself – and thankfully through the blanket. It still hurts. Even that. Even that, he failed.

But he’s not a Stormtrooper anymore.

He checks the immobile shape by his side. The faintest flutter of the bedcover reveals that Rose is still breathing. He’s a Resistance fighter now. His choice. And he’ll remain one even if they throw him out when they understand the full scape of the harm caused. His choice – for Rose, and for all the Paiges and Roses of this Galaxy. And because – has it only been a few days since he said that, as cynical as he felt then? because it’s the right thing to do. The image of Poe, bloodied, hopeful, intense – amused? –  as he listened to these words flashes at the front of his mind. For Poe, too.

The Falcon lurches again and emits a particularly ominous, metal-tearing noise. No destroyer Finn has ever been on ever moaned and rang like that.

“ _I hate this_ ,” he hisses, not sure his resentment is aimed towards the frailty of the walls around them or at his own unease.

“It’s just temperature changes,” Rose’s oh so faint voice whispers. “Direct sunlight, coming and going. The metal distorts, stretches and pings. Completely normal in a ship this size with so little sonic insulation. Is that– oh my Gods, is that the _Falcon_?”

“Rose!” Finn exhales, never as relieved in his life before. “You’re awake!”

Her laugh is very small but it’s there – it’s the self-deprecating one she makes when she thinks she’s not worth the inconvenience. “I’ve been, on-an-off. Watching people come and go, trying to understand where – it’s easier now that the lights are on, it’s the Falcon, Finn, I can’t believe it! How?”

Finn pushes himself up on his knees, untangling the blanket, – Rose eyes shift on it, come back to him – feels her brow and checks her pulse. He fumbles a bit to find it, maybe because of numb fingers from an awkward sleep position, but that it’s very fast, too fast, isn’t an artefact of numbness. Yet she appears to relax under his hand, letting her head fall back with a small contented sigh.

“After you saved my life,” Finn says – she smiles – “I got you back in the mine. Then, uh, Luke Skywalker –”

“ _Luke Skywalker?_ ”

“Yeah. He came in, nobody knows how, kind of kept the First Order off us long enough for Poe to lead us away, and then Rey got us out and onto the Falcon.”

“Us? Everyone? But she’s – small, a smuggler ship! Where are – oh. Is that what we caused when we – oh. Oh no!”

She’s crying, and Finn finds he’s squeezing her hand much too hard. “I’m sorry,” he says, feeling despair well up. “Rose, it’s my fault, I –”

She lets out a hiccupping breath. “No, Finn. I don’t want you to think –” she sniffles, has a small, resolute smile – “oh, I’m so glad you’re alive!”

That he’s alive cost her so much, might cost her more, and he doesn’t want to think she could pay it with her life. “Because you saved me, you fool” he says. “Rose, you shouldn’t have. When we laid you down in the Falcon I was so afraid” – she smiles, a wide, sunny smile – “so afraid you wouldn’t wake up and I couldn’t thank you…”

That someone would care enough to save him, and more than this, tell him that placing someone’s life above everything is something to celebrate is such a precious, unheard, new thing for Finn that it might still balance all the evil of the last day. She probably doesn’t see it like that, though, or he didn’t tell it right. He knows at once because her face closes and her mouth tenses. “I absolutely should have,” she says, sounding small and sad and sort of hopeful. “I think I told you why.”

Finn didn’t know, back then, how to react to her kiss. He still doesn’t know how to answer. So he fusses around, takes her pulse again – still fast –, retrieves the blanket he slung over his shoulder to tuck her in.

She looks cold, with too pale lips and slightly sunken eyes. There are no medics left in the Resistance – bad luck, they told him, a chance thing, all the wounded from the medical frigate, all the med-droids and most of the medics were in two of the transports who were caught in the fire, and then on Crait everyone still standing fought regardless of their occupation, pilots, engineers, geologists, medics – many more died. Finn has a hard time identifying faces and names, but he still remembers one of them, the woman who took care of Chewbacca when they touched D’Qar, Kalonia. She had complimented Finn on his first-aid knowledge. And now she’s dead.

They still had to care for the wounded from the Crait battle, and among the atmosphere of frantic exhaustion that prevailed during the first hours in the Falcon there has been a scrambling for medical supplies and life support, with Chewbacca opening compartments, pulling out life kits, setting up cots, and showing once again that Han’s survival, all these years, had maybe less to do with luck and more with the care of a skilled friend. Finn helped with the ancient med-scan they found, operated the bone-setter on many fractures, among which Rose’s ribs and whole left side, heard others lament the absence of bacta – but no Stormtrooper ever counted on bacta for field medicine, so he made do with what they had to treat Rose’s burns. Now he only hopes the internal trauma isn’t worse than it appears.

“Commander Dameron gave you this blanket,” Rose says, appearing on the verge of pushing it away. Ultimately, she wraps it more closely around her.

Another thing he doesn’t know how to answer. He wants to ask her why she calls Poe Commander when the three of them felt so close, brought together by the same emergency and the same goal, plotting on. Or, if she’s going to behave like a soldier, why she isn’t going by Captain. In truth, he’d like to know how Poe looked, how tired, how defeated or how hopeful. In the end he doesn’t say anything, lost instead inside the recollection of what happened earlier, as he notices the distinctive frayed edge of this particular blanket.

Poe was mumbling in his sleep, tossing around, hugging himself, his knuckles white and his nails blue. Finn walked to him, and in the dimmed light of the Falcon’s main room he could still see the small healing wound on Poe’s cheekbone, a last physical reminder of the Finalizer. Poe isn’t the first person Finn heard screaming in Kylo Ren’s chair – only the first he saved. As he looked on, the acute feeling of loss for all these lives, mingled with relief at this particular man being still here, brought in an overwhelming need to touch, to feel the warmth of his skin and the solidity of the bone beneath, as if a contact could close the wound and erase the memory, or give them both strength. He remembers Poe’s cheek was rough with stubble and a little clammy, that it felt like some of Poe’s essence seeped through Finn’s fingers into his soul, and that Poe exhaled a little moan and shivered. That’s when Finn went to Rey’s book drawer and got the last blanket out for him, and when he became aware of Leia Organa’s presence at the corridor end, watching and mouthing a silent thank you.

“Rose,” he says finally. “I’m glad you’re alive, too.”

She doesn’t react and her eyes are closed again. He wishes he had found the time to make her drink something, but doesn’t dare to shake her awake. So he slides against the wall, takes her hand and just sits there, watching the sleepers around them gasp, swear and wake up, looking around, counting each other.

 

 

In the next hour people begin to trickle into their corner. They remind Finn of Rose, something in the way they talk, same initial skittishness maybe, same uniform that Finn can’t help but find ugly, bunching up, tight where it shouldn’t and overly loose elsewhere, with a cut that emphasises the ass in a way that’s only pleasant on people – well, people like Poe, if he’s honest with himself. At least five of them wear a ring similar to Rose’s, and the sixth, a vaguely toad-like non-human Finn can’t assign to any precise species, notices his interest.

“Do you like our rings?”

“Rose has the same. I saw how it works.” Back in his Stormtroopers days, something like that, maybe embedded in some part of the armour, would have been great. There _were_ some undercurrents of rebellion among them, or if rebellion is too strong a word of self-affirmation, maybe. Or of small-scale solidarity, and some coded gestures to acknowledge it. “Is it something you earn?”

The non-human stretches their mouth even wider, in something that’s unmistakeably a wide-open smile. “I’d say you’ve earned it,” they say, their long thin tongue pointing out and making their words hiss. “Not two weeks out of the First Order and you’d have died for us. What do you say, Rose?”

 “I’d say that it’s time to stop dying for each other. Live, instead.” She’s awake again.

“Yes. To fight another day,” the non-human says.

Her fingers tighten around Finn’s. “And to see the day when we stop fighting and learn to love again.”

The guy utters a strange spluttering sound and bends to touch their forehead to Rose’s. “And that’s why you’re so precious to us,” they breathe. “Thanks for reminding us that’s we’re sentients, not machines.”

“Shut up,” Rose says with a self-conscious, forced grin. “And yes, of course Finn deserves a ring, if we still have the materials to weld him one. He’s a hero.”

 _Not again_. “I’m not a hero,” he protests. “The opposite, actually. I can’t believe you all still –”

“Don’t, Finn,” Rose says.

She’s right. He doesn’t want to drag her in with him. “Do you need to be a hero to get a ring?” he asks.

“No,” Rose answers. “Only to understand what we’re in this for.”

“Fathiers?” Finn asks.

“That’s a part of it,” Rose answers, with a secret smile that deepens her dimples and tells him that she knows how serious they both are. “Suusht, you think you can find enough wire and alloy?”

“The storing compartments are a hoarder’s dream,” Suusht says. “I’m sure I can.”

Suusht leaves but Rose isn’t left alone for long. The same ten or so people come and go, hold her hand, make her drink, turn to Finn with worried faces at the sight of her drawn, pinched features. Some sing, with Rose attempting to sing along. BB-8 emerges from whatever corner he was hiding, rolls over to extend a pincer and offers Rose, very solemnly, a gold coin from Canto Bight. It makes her laugh and then grimace in pain. The droid makes that thing where he appears to flatten down in shame and rolls away very slowly.

“When you’ve seen how murderous he can be,” Rose whispers, “it spoils the effect a little. Cute little killing machine.”

“Yes, but with a great heart,” Finn says. “Wait, heart?”

“Processor?” Rose offers. She inspects BB-8’s offering. “Good coin. Genuine, worth a lot, and pretty. Nice present, especially when you know he stole it.”

 

Some time later, Finn feels a gaze on him and looks up to see Poe exiting the cockpit area. But Finn is in the process of helping Rose try a solid ration and when he looks again it’s to see Poe nod, his mouth pressed into something vaguely pained that makes Finn want erase it – why does he think of doing it with his thumb? – and disappear toward the fresher.

When Poe emerges, he’s barefoot and wrapped in some wide, nondescript garment with folds and pockets and a hood. He’s holding his pants and shirt in his hands, and if he really has tried to clean them with a sonic fresher then Finn wishes him luck with the wrinkles. The sonic also made things to his hair, which doesn’t appear to overjoy him. He keeps pulling and pressing on the tightest curls, trying to smooth them across his head only to have them spring back to life milliseconds later.

C’ai, Poe’s pilot friend, comes to sit with Finn.

“Poe and his hair,” he appears to say, although his Basic is so heavily accented that Finn isn’t sure.

Other flightsuit-clad people converge to Finn and Rose and join some of Rose’s friends – so few, these pilots, three, then four of them, their numbers already heavily culled by the Starkiller run, then decimated by Poe’s suicidal assault on the dreadnought – and in the end, the rest taken out one by one, some still at dock, others in fighters, yet others in transports, and the last on Crait in that ill-fated onslaught that Finn set in motion. Connix comes next, and the last to join is Nien Nunb, the Sullustan pilot that they seem to consider a legend – his arrival seems to make everyone stir and stand straighter. Poe’s mutineers, Finn understands finally, and one more that they feel proud – or glad? Does any of them have the right to feel proud? –  to have at their side.

When Poe notices the gathering, he gulps in a large breath and turns to Rose, sending her a wide-eyed, determined, desperate look. Then he looks down at his clothes in his hands, shakes his head, disappears under the poncho thing to put them on. When he reappears, tossing the garment on his shoulder, it’s with crinkled pants, shirt sleeves that aren’t so much wrinkled as totally scrunched up, and a collar that curls into a misshapen tube. It calls Finn’s attention to his throat, to the chain and the different-shaped ring that dangle there, and to his Adam’s apple bobbing up, to collarbones raising and falling with his obviously fastening breathing. He seems to forget he’s barefoot.

When he arrives at Rose’s cot he’s still not talking, which Finn already understands is a rare occurrence. He kneels at her head and while for Finn it was just a way to be close enough, for him it looks like a penance.

His intake of air is audible. “Rose,” – his voice is sandy to the point of sounding off, but he doesn’t clear his throat – “when we boarded the Falcon I said there’d come a time when we’d remember all the names of our fallen. I think you were unconscious. This is not the time for a grand ceremony, not here, not yet. But I owe you this. As Paige Tico’s commanding officer, and –” he blinks and straightens, chin jutting up – “and most of all because I sent her to her death, along with many others.”

Rose’s eyes might not be accusing but they’re very solemn. “In the – ah, the usual circumstances,” she says, “you’d be giving me her personal things and telling me all the reasons why she was a hero. But I – I have nothing left of her. She burned with her bombs and her things imploded with the Raddus.”

“I’m not doing this from a higher ground,” Poe says, almost begging. “The opposite, actually. She was a hero, I’m just the one who sent her to her death. I have no right, no authority left to try to justify it. Dismiss me. Insult me. _You_ have a right to.”

“Not from a position of authority,” Rose echoes. “But of duty, Commander. Sir. Thank you, I guess. And _you’d better justify her death_. Because if she hadn’t released those bombs the dreadnought would have killed us all later.”

Poe bows his head down. “Captain,” he says. “It’s Captain.” He rummages in his pants pocket. “I _have_ something from Paige. You know no pilot flies with jewellery on their hands, too much of a liability. Tallie – Tallie, right before her last mission, found the ring in Paige’s locker and gave it to me so that I could give it to you. I thought I had left it in my flightsuit but turns out it was in my pocket pants somehow. So. Here.”

The sound that escapes from Rose’s throat is wonder morphing into a sob. She palms it, presses it into her joined hands, and lets her head fall down on the cot. “To Paige,” she says, eyes closed, lifting the ring up.

“Paige,” the pilots echo. “Tallie,” C’ai adds, the Ls sounding like a vowel, sonorous and long. Their faces are turned to Poe, waiting for some signal, and Finn can feel his hesitation like an itch in his lungs.

This time Poe can’t get any sound out and has to clear his throat. “Before we go on,” he says, his voice metallic-sounding. “You guys need to decide if you still want to look up to me. If you want me here while you say their names after you know everything.”

Nien Numb stirs at that, a swift motion of his head that Finn, he doesn’t know why, associates with impatience. He launches into a tirade in Sullustan that has the others nod with approval, their eyes intense and on Poe.

“What is he saying?” Finn whispers, probably to Rose because she’s his bridge to this new world.

She’s still awake, possibly more than ever. “He says that Poe’s guilt on having sent pilots to death is insulting to all of them here, no offence, Commander. That, uh, he remembers distinctly the death toll during the final Death Star attack, and didn’t that end the Empire? That he chose to be there as he chose to fly during the Starkiller run and again against the dreadnought. That he trusted Poe to lead them in the best possible way.”

Nien Nunb adds something that sounds very definite.

“And that he was right,” Rose finishes.

“And you,” Poe asks Rose. “What do you think?”

“That it’s how pilots act. The mystique and the sacrifice, the lust, even… I never liked when Paige got like that. I think, I think that you’re a pilot and thankfully the best. That it saved our life, twice.”

“But it didn’t! In the end, you all, what you don’t know is that I did the opposite! Trying not to be a pilot, trying to save us – and it killed us!”

That’s when Finn knows what Poe really wants to talk about. Unfair to let Poe shoulder all the blame, better if they understand it’s himself – after all, easier to shut off a nobody, a deserter fresh out of the First Order, and then Poe can go on doing what he needs to do. He stirs and stands up, opens his mouth, but Poe is faster.

“No, Finn. I’m the one who made it happen.” Poe’s up as well and stopping Finn not only with words but, like on Crait, with an arm across Finn’s torso, a hand that slides down Finn’s hip and brushes his fingers – as foreign as it feels to Finn it’s also something he realises he craves. He stands unmoving, Poe’s arm remains where it is, warm and solid, and the way their hands don’t quite touch feels like they’re magnetic and on a course to fuse together.

Poe lifts his chin high and goes on. “When I tried not to be a pilot. To find other ways to save us. I sent Finn and Rose to – to the enemy, with nothing, no one to help them, and then I – just because I needed reassurance, I blabbered about Holdo abandoning ship on the com, do you realise? Didn’t even _think_ of using code words. Holdo and Leia’s plan counted on the transports leaving unnoticed, and I blew that cover off! It’s because of me that we got shot like orobirds thinking they can fly! And I couldn’t even _warn_ the General of what I had done!”

Pose sounds out of breath, and the stunned silence around him makes his hissing attempt at controlling his respiration only more conspicuous.

“So,” he says, lower. “If you still think I can be a pilot, let me. But don’t look up at me like that.”

Finn turns to Nien Nunb, maybe hoping that he’ll have some objection, some other excuse for Poe. But the old pilot only looks down. Poe’s arm seems to vibrate with tension against Finn’s stomach, and Finn can but rotate his wrist and take Poe’s hand to steady him.

It’s a pilot in green transport garb, a dark-skinned woman with hair shooting around like sunrays, who finally talks.

“You couldn’t know,” she begins, hesitantly. Then she makes herself go on louder. “They didn’t tell you about their plan, did they? Did she, did Holdo? She didn’t tell anyone. And they stunned you unconscious. You couldn’t have warned them.”

There’s a shrill string of louder and louder beeps and BB-8 bumps into Finn’s shins.

“Ow!” Finn exclaims. “Hey, you little nuisance! What –”

“He says,” Rose and Poe begin at the same time, then stop to look at each other until Rose nods. “He says,” Poe repeats, “tell them, Finn.”

More beeps.

“That, yeah, sorry BB, of course you were there, he says tell them that you weren’t sent by yourselves. But I still think I should have –”

“BB-8 was the best bodyguard anyone could wish for,” Finn interrupts, patting the droid’s dome while wondering when he’s going to get tased. “In addition to helping Rose pilot and navigate, he saved our ass on Canto Bight and got us out of Snoke’s ship by mowing down Phasma’s guard from a stolen AT-ST.”

“Fuck,” C’ai breathes, the curse surprisingly well articulated. “Wow, BB-8!”

“You’re the best droid,” Poe says with an expression of utter adoration. “People always forget astromechs are warriors first and foremost, don’t they?”

“They’re murder-happy machines, yeah,” Rose whispers, but she’s smiling.

It seems the mood is about to lighten, but Poe doesn’t want any of this.

“Doesn’t mean I didn’t cause –”

“Oh, stop it!” Finn is surprised to hear himself shout. He pulls on Poe’s hand, too hard if he judges by Poe’s yelp, and positions himself in front of him. “Poe, you’re exhausted, you already were before fighting two major battles in one week, you – we’re all grieving, and sure, we’re all looking for ways we could have prevented, prevented _that_ , and, and I understand how it makes you want to shoulder the blame but stop it! This was my plan. You didn’t _send_ us, we asked you to! As for that leak about the transports, you commed me, yeah, anyone would have assumed I kept it to myself, _I_ was the dumbass who left the speakers on even though _I_ knew, I, not you, knew that DJ was listening!”

The small sound Poe utters is half astonishment, half protest.

“On an open com, I still should have known better. Finn, listen, I set this in motion, I –” he tries.

“Yeah! Yeah, you did, because you trusted me! A damn mistake, it was, if you ever made one!”

Now Poe is fully facing him, trapping both Finn’s wrists, head raised to make up for the inch difference in height. “No,” he says. “It wasn’t a mistake.”

“It _was_ a good plan,” Connix pipes up. “Poe, you didn’t hide anything from us. We chose to get in with you. Holdo, she kept harping about hope and she gave us none. You did! _Finn_ did. Finn, you were the only one with the appropriate knowledge and we knew you could carry this on. Without you we’d still be facing Starkiller.”

“It wasn’t a good plan”, Rose intervenes, sounding _tired_. “I’m allowed to say so because it was mine. And I should have been the one to tell you to cut off that com, Finn. You – you’d never trusted anyone before, I guess, I mean, not in the First Order? And then you fell in with us, without reservation, just trusting everyone. _I_ was the one with enough experience to know we shouldn’t have talked near DJ. Not every scoundrel you meet turns out to be Han Solo.”

“But _who’s_ DJ?” Connix asks.

“The slicer we found to break the First Order’s code,” Finn says, watching, feeling Poe tense.

“Maz’s?” Connix again.

“No. No, we saw Maz’s guy but – ah, hell, I –”

“As I said,” Rose interrupts, louder. “It wasn’t a good plan, because there should have been different people involved in the various stages, someone able to interact with _these people_ at the casino should have gone to find the code breaker, like Poe, maybe, ‘cause he’s good enough with upper-crust people when he feels like it…”

“Am not,” mumbles Poe, probably still thinking of Holdo.

“Are,” Rose retorts, and Finn is glad to see that she’s lost the Commander, Sir, somewhere. “But then, Finn had to be on the First Order ship, and I, too, because I had the technical knowledge. And we needed the time to plan our route through the Supremacy better, maybe we should have had a better look around, tried to crack the ship’s area map, timed the watches, made use of BB-8’s scan…”

She’s trying to sit up and very pale, and Finn lets go of Poe to help her.

“At least we set the Fathiers free,” he whispers into her ear, watching the small smile come and go.

“The thing is,” she continues, “we had no time for any of this. It wasn’t a good plan, but it was the only we had. Or the only one we could think of.” She bites her lips, blinks. Gulps too much air. “This was _my_ plan, if you want to lay the blame on someone. Finn for sure wasn’t keen on going back to the First Order when I met him.”

The last earns Finn a sideway, thoughtful look from Poe, followed by a tightening of the jaw as silence stretches and stares go down. Finn doesn’t know what to make of this pause. It’s tense, maybe introspective, probably accusatory, he thinks. They’re not going to void them out, but any talk of ring-giving or grieving together, any community of purpose, any mutual trust they had is gone.

Nien Nunb resumes talking but Rose appears to weak to want to translate – although after one or two sentences she might be relaxing a little. Poe nods and takes it up.

“He says this isn’t a debrief,” he translates, voice curiously flat. “This isn’t – it certainly isn’t a court martial.”

Yeah, because there’s no army left for it, Finn thinks gloomily, rising up and making a conscious effort not to stand at attention. His guilt must show, because Poe’s friend C’ai steps in and passes an arm across his shoulders, squeezing his arm briefly. Finn is too stunned to react and Poe… Maybe Poe’s hand twitches, although he smiles.

“He talks only for himself,” Poe keeps on translating. The contrast between his drained voice and Nunb’s vehemence is grating. “I mean that’s what he says. What we were pitched against was so huge, any plan would have had terrible odds. He wants to keep on with me as a leader because I took the responsibility to do something when I didn’t have to – yeah, but I _had_ to, Nien. How I saw it, we were just running away to our death – Problem is _what_ I thought I saw.”

Nien Nunb’s voice would cut plastisteel. Poe doesn’t speak.

“We all see same,” C’ai translates in his faulty Basic. “We fear, hate what we see,” he adds although Nien is silent. “We don’t _do_. You, and Rose, Finn, _do_ thing. And share with us. Still share. You’re my leader, Poe.”

It’s Suusht, the ring-maker, who speaks next. Finn has a feeling that Rose’s friends aren’t that used to taking the lead when pilots are here. “And you too, Finn. Many of us here know what Rose can do when she decides she must. It’s good to know she’s got someone at her side.”

This is just ridiculous. Are they mad? “What? I’m not a leader! I never… Where did you see me –”

“On Crait,” Connix says. “You never stopped going forward. You spoke and made us go on. You gave us hope, not with just words but with tasks.”

Rose and Poe snort at the same time. “Finn”, Poe begins –

“If you could see your face!” Rose ends.

“However handsome it – damn. Nevermind, I’m tired.”

“Yes it is,” Rose says, almost aggressively. “So. I – uh. Since we’re not trying to blame our defeat on each other –” she has a small, exhausted sigh. “Let’s go on? Poe?”

“Yes,” Poe says. “Yes. I’m sorry, Rose. To Paige Tico.”

Two pilots, then three, then all of them, Poe included, make a weird, short gesture, the heels of their hands joined and the fingers jerking open, like something you’d send up flying.

“Pilots,” Rose murmurs to Finn. “Often, there’s nothing left of them when they die. So…” She opens her hands, just like them, and the others follow.

“To Tallie,” Rose says, voice breaking. “Tallissan Lintra, thank you.”

“Jaycris Tubbs,” C’ai adds. “Miras Starck.”

“Karé Kun,” Poe says. “Oh Force, Karé…”

Even while overwhelmed by too many names, no logic nor numbers in them, Finn understands that there’s nothing official to their litany. They won’t take turns, won’t always use the same template, aren’t aiming for an exhaustive list of the fallen. It’s not about heroes, duty, nor about boosting the morale, as in the ceremonies to which Finn was subjected in the First Order, but about having those they miss close to them, one more time. He never had that before and wants to be a part of it.

The naming goes on, and very rarely, he catches someone he knows. “General Ematt,” Connix says, almost saluting, which sends his mind running after an image of a straight-backed, white-haired man, standing in the gloom of the Crait mine. Finn takes in a breath.

“Han Solo,” he says, joining them, and feels his heart soar when the name is carried on by others. “FN-2003,” he adds before the rumble has died down enough for them to really hear him, just for himself and for Slip. Slip, not really a good guy, but not an evil one either, who was a part of Finn’s education to comradeship. And whose death, at the hand of some innocent villager, or – who knows, they were facing his way at the time – maybe at Poe’s hand, set Finn’s rebellion into motion.

Nobody noticed, he thinks, until he catches Poe’s stare, the twitch of his eyebrows and then the slow, understanding smile. Other names are sent up, caught and echoed, some like ships soaring up, some soft like feathers, until, gradually, the rhythm slows down, a few names more are whispered, and resolve into silence.

A name is still missing – is it because nobody feels it belongs only to one them? Or because his end was too lofty, too unreal? They’re all carrying him inside since Leia told of his death – but his name needs to be spoken.

“To Luke Skywalker,” he says, met by another kind of silence, one that doesn’t feel empty and that he doesn’t fear.

They nod and make, all at once, that send off gesture with their hands.

 

The moment ends with a small pained grunt from Rose.

“Painkillers?” Finn asks at once, wondering how much they’ve got left. He’ll have to ask Poe about how long they need to make it last.

Rose nods and Finn notices how sunken her eyes look – a trick of the light, or is it getting worse? For the fifth or seven time, he wishes they had a better body scan.

The others disperse, Suusht with a soft “hold on!” to Rose. Poe lingers, shifting his weight from one leg to the other, maybe waiting for something. Right before the moment Finn was going to ask him what this is about, he squeezes Finn’s biceps with a look Finn would identify as encouraging or maybe proud – although he’s still not the best at non-First Order body language (he thinks maybe he’s getting good with Poe’s, though).

“Just a moment,” Poe says, but not to Finn.

He kneels again at Rose’s bedside and whispers something into her ear, too softly for Finn to catch it.

“I didn’t do it for you,” Rose replies in a low but distinct voice.

“Yeah. Yes, I know,” Poe answers, his eyes going fast from Rose to Finn to Rose to Finn again, then his hand going up to his forehead as he were trying to brush something away. “Thank you, all the same. And now I’d better – where’s the galley in here? Uh. Damn. What time is it? Can’t already have been a whole cycle? Finn,” he says with a look so intense Finn has to step back. “I’m hungry.”

“There are, um, rations by the cargo door, upper compartment. Use insta-cook, the stove is, ah –”

“Unreliable?”

“Uh. Decrepit? A major hazard, more like? Poe. You haven’t eaten since we boarded? For a whole cycle?”

“Nah, I had, uh, this.” He digs out the package of a half-eaten emergency bar. Definitely not enough, and Poe knows it. “Really need something more substantial though,” he says, swaying a little.

“Of course you do. With such a responsibility as piloting this ship, shouldn’t you take care of yourself?”

Poe blinks, making Finn wonder if the bruised-like circles under his eyes are a permanent feature or the result of recent horror.

“Yeah, you’re right. Need to get some more sleep, too.”

A grunt, half encouraging and half vindictive, emanates from Rose’s cot.

“Okay,” Poe says. “Going. Hold on, Rose. You – hold on.”

A last squeeze of Finn’s arm, coming with an insistent look that means to convey all the feelings in the galaxy, if only Finn could guess _which_ feelings, and Poe pivots on his heels, wobbles, and leaves.

“What’s the matter with him?” Finn asks Rose, not sure if the weirdness that radiates from Poe is real or something suggested by his own First Order upbringing. “Is it the tension from facing the others?”

He doesn’t feel that well himself. It’s dawning on him that not only he and Rose aren’t going to get court-martialled or thrown away, but that the others are looking up to them. He knows Rose has this in her, not like Poe has – she’s not shiny and magnetic and beautiful, not a propaganda girl, – but in a stealthy, quiet, stubborn, unstoppable way. But himself? He’s impulsive and misinformed and lost and he still thinks they’re making a mistake.

“He doesn’t understand his luck, that’s the matter with him,” Rose says. “Finn. You don’t have to stay here, I mean by my side, you know? Have you eaten?”

“But I _want_ to stay here,” Finn says, earning himself that same happy-then-sad smile from earlier. Rose is an anchor in this scary new place, and she saved his life. He owes her this. “One of your friends got me rations, I’m good. How do you feel? Not too dizzy with the painkillers?”

She grimaces a little. “Actually, I’d like more. My belly hurts.”

That’s not good. Finn _can_ give her more, but he shouldn’t have to.

“Here,” he says, helping her swallow. “It’s gonna make you sleep, you know?”

“Sleep?” She says. “I’d like that.”

 

Finn would like it too, but what he manages feels very close to the state of suspended alertness every Stormtrooper has perfected after their first year of standing guard. He wonders what his former self would have thought of achieving it sitting with his back propped against the wall – probably nothing good. He knows that even early on he’d have appreciated the added benefice of being allowed to eat, though – rations from the Falcon’s stock have more diverse textures than First Order approved ones, but even with the all-pervading stale aftertaste, Finn is absurdly glad to have found two of his old favourites.

His tired mind falls back into familiar patterns. The eye gets caught more easily by officers’ attires, classical defence move. The brain thinks in pattern, who goes with whom, who mills around aimlessly, who walks with purpose from ration inventories to maps to comms, and who just sits there, head in hands, defeated. There’s no correlation. Some bridge officers are among the most lethargic – Finn thinks one man must have been Holdo’s personal aide – or the most agitated, and among those who’re already preparing the next stage Finn can identify Connix, the curly and grey-haired woman who’s so close to General Organa, and many of Rose’s and Poe’s people. Shifts, not so much in power as in drive and structure – they might still call each other General or Captain, but if they survive the Resistance will have been reforged and tempered, slipping away from a military mould that already didn’t fit well into something more fluid, interwoven.

A tiny rustling sound, and some weird sixth sense pulls Finn out of his reverie. He turns his head to meet Rey’s stare as she sits only centimetres away from him.

“Rey!” he shouts. “Rey, Force, you could warn a man before coming so close!”

“Oh,” she says, looking more puzzled than sorry. “I thought you were maybe falling asleep, I didn’t want to talk and wake you up. Don’t Stormtroopers often stay very close to each other?”

Do they? Finn had never really thought of it. But he can’t remember not having someone by his side.

“Yes,” he says. “We, uh, they do. But they don’t creep on each other like that without warning! You startled me!”

“Sorry. Sorry. I wanted – there have been so many changes, so – so many dead, I wanted to be near someone I – someone who’s close to me? I mean, if you feel the same?”

“I do,” Finn says, slowly. He looks for a word to call what he feels with Rey, doesn’t find any. “You do feel close. Familiar?”

Reassuring, possibly. Steady.

“Like a place you can always come back to,” he tries. He doesn’t add that what comes to his mind is one of the storage units for cleaning supplies in the Finalizer. He _liked_ that cupboard. It was large and unimportant enough that no one cared about the rust and dirt that were beginning to form shapes around the corners and close to the floor. One of the shapes looked like an elongated head with a large snout, another like a fish-shaped ship. He’d began colouring in some of them, adding lines, swirls, vegetation, worlds, just with his wet finger dipped into the orange rust. It was a cupboard in which to be yourself and open yourself to dreams. Maybe he’ll tell her one day. Not now.

“Would you like an egg?” Rey asks, making Finn realise that what she was holding in her hand was causing the strange smell, itself an element of his awareness of Rey’s presence.

She’s holding it very close to his face. He can’t help recoiling slightly.

“Is that a Porg egg?” he asks to gain some time. “Why would I need it?”

“To eat it of course!” she answers, more vehemently than Finn would have thought possible given the subject at hand.

That thing came out of the lower end of a bird.

“But it is – isn’t that – organic? Uh, I mean, coming from an organic species?” Now Rey guffaws. Finn doesn’t want to upset her, but an _egg_? “Thank you, but, uh, no. I’ve had, uh, rations. I’m full.”

“But it tastes so much better than rations! And rations are organic too, Finn, we’re not droids!”

“Oh, yeah, sure, but—” he was about to say that rations come from _civilised_ organic products, tried and tested yeasts from controlled environments. And then he realises he’s just had so many new textures, sounds, kinds of people, ideas, clothes, emotions for his last days of awake time, and that food was maybe one new thing too much. “I’ve eaten rations all my life,” he says. “Just rations. I like the taste.”

That’s not completely true. He remembers late night on D’Qar and a meal he took with Poe that felt both like the last and maybe like rebirth. There had been textures, green things with stringy bits that tasted of earth and looked suspiciously like leaves, and tough fibre-shaped proteins that might have been _muscle_ once. The protein had been covered with some thick fluid that tasted sour and made the eaters’ mouth shiny. Poe had licked his lips and it had made Finn want to try the food. Even though, he hadn’t eaten much – but then not many had.

“Oh,” Rey makes. She bites into the egg and he can see the flare of her nostrils and the nearly blissful blink of her eyes. “I’ve always enjoyed completing rations with tastier things. Rations. They never gave us enough, and now I think I’ve had too many of them.” She gives him a wide smile decorated with small bits of yolk. “But that’s okay! You keep the rations, I keep the eggs.”

She chomps for a while in a silence that’s very relative, and Finn reflects that he never heard a Stormtrooper eat that way. But then rations don’t lend themselves very well to chomping.

 

“Ben would creep on me,” Rey says abruptly. Then, after a pause: “Maybe he felt I crept on him too.”

“Ben?”

She tenses. “Kylo Ren.”

“What? _Kylo Ren_ crept on you?”

In Finn’s long experience of trying to avoid Kylo Ren, he’s never witnessed him managing to creep on someone. Grab a poor soul with the Force and hurl them against the furniture, yes. Throw at them whatever tool wasn’t fastened strongly enough, certainly. Yell, roar, turn a console into scrap metal, more than once. But stealth, from him? It feels chilling, as if a deadly mass weapon had learned to slither through shields.

“Creeping, like, stealthily?” he voices out. Saying it aloud brings a need for nervous laughter, which he transforms into a too-wide smile. It feels absurd, unreal, because when would Kylo Ren have found the time to creep on Rey? She was with Luke Skywalker, wasn’t she? And very shortly, from what he’s gathered, up in the Supermacy for some kind of big confrontation that doesn’t feel like anyone crept on anyone else?

Rey doesn’t smile.

“With the Force. He wasn’t there, and then he was. His voice, his face. His body. Touch, even.”

Finn has a feeling she’s telling this for the first time. Only to him. She sounds weird, trembling, falling to a lower register on the last words. Is he jealous?

“He saw me, too,” Rey continues in a toneless voice. “It felt… Intimate. And powerful. And _disgusting_ , like I had no say at all in it!”

Finn has no problem sympathising with the disgust, at least. “He – uh, _you both_ teleported yourselves with the Force? And touched?” Maybe he wants to break something. Maybe he just wants to take Rey and get them both as far as they can – but is there anywhere far enough?

“No. We stayed where we were. It was just – a bridge, an image. Like there was something in us both that made the link possible. A kin. An attraction.” She shivers, saying that, and Finn would swear that’s not out of desire. “A sameness.”

“But you are _nothing_ like him!” Finn blurts out, never so certain in his life.

“Are you sure?” Rey says, still in that weird voice. “Then I am what he should have been. Or he’s what I could have become. Maybe that’s what the bond is made of.”

“Break it,” Finn whispers. “Please, Rey.”

“ _Snoke made it!_ ” she hisses. “And then Ben killed him. Where could I find the power to destroy it?” She sighs and Finn is surprised to see her smile this time, small and resolute. “You don’t seem to be that moved by Snoke’s death.”

“I guess it’s good?” Finn tries. He’s never learned to fear Snoke like he feared Phasma, Kylo Ren or even Hux. “Hux and Kylo Ren together at the top, I’m sure half the Stormtrooper have taken bets on who kills the other one first.”

Rey smiles wider. “Yeah, he’s not extremely good at reining in his emotions, is he?”

“Kylo Ren? Yeah. And Hux is worse. He reins everything in, sure. And then he explodes.”

“Actually,” Rey says, turned inward again. “I can break contact. I don’t know if the bond will ever disappear, but I shut B- Kylo Ren off when we boarded the Falcon. Maybe it’s easier now that Snoke’s dead. Finn, you’ll help me? Anchor me here?”

Even two days ago, he wouldn’t have known how. But since then, he’s had Rose showing him. Open his arms, pull Rey in, include her in this group of people whose fight isn’t for power or supremacy. Love.

He doesn’t really open his arms. He’s seen how on-and-off she is with physical contact. “Yes,” he says instead. “Yes, of course, I will.”

It’s her who puts her hand on his.

“On Takodana,” she says, “Maz told me I shouldn’t look behind. That what I needed, I’d find it looking forward. Well, what I found on Ahch-To… If that’s what I needed, then it’s cruel. How did you manage, growing up just one among so many – I mean, without parents? Not even the memory of one?”

This is not what he expected and the hurt is surprisingly acute, making him want to lash out – what is that for, gratuitous curiosity?

“You have special parents yourself, of course,” he says, mouth feeling thick.

“No. I thought I had. That’s what Ahch-To gave me. The certitude that I was wrong. Finn, please. How did you do it?”

Finn has always wondered if he really has no memories of his parents. When sleep wouldn’t come, when the pressure of learning to fit in was too strong, he’d run after the memory of a memory of a plump, smiling mouth, and catch maybe the two first notes of a lullaby. But then, every cadet would come with such stories.

“Like you did. We all invented –” she swallows a sob and he corrects himself. “At least _our_ stories were invented, we didn’t have weird incredible powers to back them up like you, eh? Oh, sure, the official discourse was all about how the First Order had chosen us, how our officers were our parents and duty our mother.”

“It didn’t work,” Rey states.

“How could it? Cadets always ran with the most outlandish stories. I liked to imagine I was a prince, sometimes. I even imagined I was you! I mean, that I’d get my hand on a lightsaber and be shown to have the strongest abilities with the Force since Vader.” He laughs, and for the first time it doesn’t feel bitter. “Yeah, and when I got my hands on a lightsaber I mostly felt like a fool.”

“You held your own!” Rey protests. “You saved my life!”

“You saved mine, more like.” He raises a hand to touch the area on his shoulder where Poe stapled up the jacket, but the jacket is gone, left in DJ’s stolen ship. He sighs. “When the lights were down, you know, this moment when there are sniffles all around, I just imagined arms. Loving arms. I told myself one day I’d love as strongly as I wanted to be loved right then.”

Rey blinks several times in a row. “Did you imagine yourselves siblings?” she asks.

Fin shakes his head. “No. Too dangerous. We couldn’t form any attachment bypassing obedience. We were comrades – competitors, often, they set us against each other. Examples, maybe, at best? Good or bad. Even though I know I –” He silences himself. He has to stop thinking of that tiny thing he maybe had with Slip as a flaw.

“Would you like – I mean, do you think you could imagine you’re my brother?” Rey spoke very fast, like she herself has a hard time getting it out. “Leia said Luke and herself had chosen each other like that.”

“But they’re siblings by blood, aren’t they?”

“She said that wasn’t what’s important, for her. That she chose him. Will you…?”

He has to blink. She’s openly crying.

“Of course,” he says. “Rey, of course, you know it.”

They’re in each other’s arms, still sitting and uncomfortably twisted sideway. Rey’s hair smells like nothing Finn could name – except it’s the kind of nothing you only notice when you’re back after a long time away.

“You smell like home,” Rey says.

Finn smiles, wider and wider. “I know.”

 

“Poe says Rose saved your life,” Rey says. “I’m glad you’re not dead.”

Finn thinks his lack of family and collective upbringing made him prone to attachment and unsure of himself. Rey’s lack of family and lonely childhood made her self-reliant and abrupt. He likes it in her.

“So this is her,” Rey continues. “Rose.”

“Rose Tico,” Finn says. “She’s wonderful.”

“Oh.” Rey sounds maybe a little suspicious. She stands up and watches Rose’s unmoving, still-breathing form on the cot. “Is she all right? She got wounded on Crait, didn’t she?”

“She did. She crashed her speeder into mine trying to stop me from – from proving something, I guess. And dying in the process. I don’t know if she’ll be all right.”

It’s easier getting it out with Rey listening. When they’ll have told each other enough secrets, they’ll have common memories, like true siblings.

“She said she’d done it because of love,” he adds. He feels more than he hears Rey’s little huff, hot breath on his cheek. “I don’t – I didn’t like how she said it. I think I can’t – Rey, she gave me a place here. She made me feel at home – not like you do, but it completes it somehow. There’s this community of people, here, but also in forgotten corners, forsaken places of the Galaxy, with ties so strong I never even dreamed of it, and she made me a part of them. And she’s courageous, and clever, and she can _laugh_ , Rey! I love her. But I don’t – she _kissed_ me.”

“Did you kiss back?” Rey asks in a very serious, inquisitive tone. Finn wonders if that’s how sisters sound.

“Stormtroopers don’t kiss,” he says with a fake laugh. “I didn’t know how I should react. It felt like I didn’t know _anything_. I didn’t _feel_ anything. Have you already kissed someone?”

“No. Never worth the risk, back in Jakku.” She pauses. “I kind of thought of doing it since then.”

The tension between her eyebrows clues him in.

“You thought of kissing Kylo –” no. With that name it feels absurd. “Of kissing Ben?”

“I know it’s a dumb thing to do!” she defends herself. “But yes, yes I did. He was – young, and sort of lost, but still, yes, strong, and he – it looked like maybe that was something he wanted…”

“But did you want it?” Finn exclaims, maybe too forcefully.

“I don’t know. I don’t know, all right! What I know is that I don’t want it anymore. I won’t have him murder people and come back for his get-better kiss.” She shivers. “That disgusts me.”

“Good,” Finn can’t help saying. “Good. Hey, Rey. Do you think we could maybe kiss? So that we know…”

… Know what? How it should feel between two people who like each other a lot? How it is when you don’t feel guilty? Whether Rey’s guilty desire and Finn’s guilt at his lack of desire were chance things? Finn knows siblings shouldn’t kiss. But that’s why Rey and he must try this now, to make sure there isn’t something else lurking behind…

Rey appears to have arrived at the same conclusion. “Yes, so that we know… I think it could be a good thing, yes,” she says, extending her neck and raising her chin to him.

He breathes in, closes the gap and applies his lips on hers, like Rose did. Rey’s mouth is warm when Rose’s was cold – Rose was in shock, probably, or just riding an adrenaline high from her decision both to crash into Finn and reveal her love. Their lips smash a bit and Finn tries to adjust the tilt of his head – the kiss is lasting longer, it feels like he should do something. Rey’s tongue darts out, touches Finn’s upper lip, pointy and wet, bumps against his teeth and retreats.

They disengage, look at each other. Rey shakes her head. She’s right. It doesn’t bring anything more. That’s not what they need. He nods in confirmation.

Behind him, there’s a sob, a tiny “No…” and a rustle of fabric. He turns to see Rose sitting up, looking at them with a devastated expression. From where she lay, she can’t have seen Rey’s dubitative face, only the kiss and Finn’s nod.

“No, oh no,” she repeats.

“Rose, please, this isn’t –”

“Should have known it,” she whispers, and then, right when Finn was about to try to explain again, she utters a cry, half surprise and half pain, and vomits blood.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Cliffhanger... But only for a few minutes! Second Finn chapter coming up very soon.
> 
> Please, please please. If you've come that far, tell me what you thought! Or if you'd prefer, wait for the conclusion of Finn's chapter... Romance to come.


	4. Finn (part two)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Here's the action! And the romance.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Second part of the Finn chapter. If you've missed it the first part is chapter 3.  
> Hope you'll enjoy!

“Fuck!” Rey shouts as Finn jumps to Rose, trying simultaneously to uncover her, hold her while she keeps vomiting, and lay her on her side.  That’s a lot of blood.

“Finn…” Rose says, small, a call for help.

“Rose, by the Force –” it’s not the time to panic. She’s awake, she’s responsive, there are things he can do – “you’re having internal bleeding, that’s what it is, where does it hurt, tell me –”

“Everywhere,” she breathes out. “Everywhere.”

He lifts up her shirt, watches with consternation the heavy bruising around her navel – wasn’t there before, that’s not good – and how it spread on her left side. He palms blindly beside her cot, trying to locate the body scan.

“What can I do?” Rey says urgently. “Finn?”

Other people are gathering close, attracted by the commotion.

“Everyone, leave if you don’t know what to do. Rey, pass me the body scan.”

Rey bends in and takes something. “This?” she asks.

He looks. “No, that’s the bone setter.”

She tries another tool.

“Dammit, Rey, no! That’s – I don’t know what it is, one of Rose’s tools, you should know better than me!”

She looks down. “An helicoidal circuit auger,” she says with disgust at himself. “Finn, I don’t know!”

“Here,” Rose whispers, pushing the body scan with her foot. Her breathing is extremely fast and her skin white, blue lips, blue nails.

“Yeah, this,” Finn says. “Hold on, Rose, please –”

She smiles to him and closes her eyes.

“Rose, please!”

“Here,” Rey repeats, pushing the body scan into his hands.

“Do we have more IV bags?” Finn yells to no one in particular, because he knows what he’s going to see, fears it, has to do something, even though he’s so afraid –

The bleeding is unmistakeable. Gastro-intestinal track, and what was maybe a tiny possibility before, at the limit of what the antique, un-calibrated body scan could sense, something that one could hope would spontaneously resolve, has now become a terrible certainty.

“An IV line!” Finn repeats. “Blood! A bag of blood, do we have that? Where’s Chewbacca?”

“Chewie’s in the cockpit,” Rey says. “I’ll go –”

“I know where there are more,” another voice, female, says. A rush of feet, the rustle of heavy fabric.

Finn stoops over Rose, tries to zoom in with the scan. He can see the blood trickle – not flow, he tells himself, trickle, but fast. He turns to Rey, feeling defeated.

“This won’t stop fast enough. I don’t know if we can fill her fast enough. The blood vessels need to be ligated, _fuck_.”

“How?” Rey asks.

“Surgery,” Finn says, although he feels like a fraud saying it.

“Then do it!”

“I don’t know how! I’m a trooper, not a medic!”

“Here,” the voice from earlier interrupts. Lined, bejewelled hands put an IV line into his, pile on bags of blood close to Rose, put the last one, connected to the line, into Rey’s.

“Thanks,” he says mechanically. At least setting in a line is something he can do. Rose has fallen back on her pillow, eyes closed, breathing shallow.

“Can’t it be enough?” Rey asks, sounding on the verge of panic.

“No. She’s bleeding faster than we can fill her in, and with the shock setting in… Rey! You can move things with the Force, can you do this?”

“That’s not how –” Rey begins, then stops. “Okay, maybe the Force can work like this, but I can’t. Sorry, Finn. Wouldn’t know where to begin. It’s not the Force, it’s someone’s insides, I – Leia, can _you_ do it? You’ve been in wars, you must know…”

General Leia Organa, whose ring-adorned hands it was, sighs, or maybe utters some swearing that Finn doesn’t completely catch. “With proper instruments, maybe. Bacta… I’ve never had to deal with such – dammit.”

Finn can’t let Rose go. Not now. Not like that. Not when they’ve lost already so many. Not Rose.

He’s not a medic, no. But he’s a Stormtrooper. There are things he heard about, that were passed on. There might be a way…

“The bone setter,” he says.

This time, Rey jumps fast and gives him the right tool. He turns it around in his hands.

“A bone setter rearranges tissues at a molecular level,” he says, recalling the lesson. “You can bypass its settings in an emergency. Change the frequency, lower the intensity, then there’s something you have to do with the nozzle, so that you can focus on micro structures, and, huh, find something to couple it with so that you see what you’re doing.”

“Yeah,” Rey says, sounding interested and hopeful. “Okay, right, do it? Finn?”

He realises he’s standing there, tool in hand, doing nothing. Thinking, maybe, but in circles. Panicking.

“I can’t,” he says. “I’ve heard of it, I could manipulate it once done, but that’s –” he looks Rey straight in the eye. “Erm, above my level?”

She grabs the tool, begins to unscrew the cap, rummages in, the tiniest tools appearing in her hands as if conjured there.

“Okay. Give me directions. And that scan, too. What frequency do you need? Ah. That high. Won’t work for very long, you’re aware?”

“Yeah. Emergency patch, remember?”

“Okay. Give me Rose’s auger, I think there’s a micron-hose there – yeah. Nozzle’s right, I think. How do you want the scan?”

Finn thinks if she goes on like this for a minute longer he won’t be able to keep in the hysterical laughter.

“So that I can have it on my arm while I operate the setter,” he says.

He’d swear she doesn’t work at it for more than thirty seconds.

He breathes in. “Okay. Anybody more qualified than me for clamping arteries shut with a bone setter?”

He looks at Leia, kind of hoping she’ll volunteer. Then he notices the slight tremor in her hands.

“Okay,” he repeats, bending over Rose’s abdomen. “Wish us luck.”

“The Force is with you,” Leia Organa says in such a definite voice that he might believe it.

It takes too long. The blood is seeping everywhere and makes finding the torn areas hard. The body scan isn’t better than it was and the bone setter begins to heat.

“Shut it down a few seconds,” Rey whispers. “Else it’s gonna burst or reverse settings.”

He does, then goes back to finding blood vessels to heal, shuts it down again, goes back. He’s sweating. In the corner of his eye, he sees Leia holding Rose’s wrist.

“You’re doing good,” the General says.

Finally, he thinks he’s done.

“How’s her pulse?” he asks General Organa.

“Still fast.”

He presses the tip of a finger to Rose’s skin. The imprint takes a long time to fade, whiter on white. The General nods to him.

“Another unit of blood, I think,” he says. But he feels light, lighter than he’s been since he dragged Rose back into the mine. He still uses the rigged-up scan to check for any other wound he could have missed. A few minor bruises, but nothing threatening.

“Hell,” he exhales, sitting back on his heels. Maybe it lasts for a long time.

“I think you saved her,” the General says. “The fresher is yours if you want to clean up.”

He stands since she seems to trust he can. His head is reeling. He’s got blood on his hands. On his pants legs, too, from where he knelt.

“There are clothes in the fresher, starboard drawer” the General adds. “Pants. If you’d like.”

From Han, he guesses. They had more pressing matters to attend than emptying the Falcon after his death.

 

When he comes back, the small crowd has drifted further from Rose, with only Rey sitting next to her. She sends him a reassuring smile.

The others are standing in a semicircle, facing him. Not everyone’s there – Chewbacca and Nien Nunb must be in the cockpit, Poe and a few others are sleeping somewhere. But with the adrenaline coming down it still makes for too many people, whose expressions he can’t decipher.

“Where did you learn such skills?” General Organa asks, not unkindly.

His first inclination is to flee. That’s not something a general should ask a trooper. Not a skill any officer should have seen. But then, what’s official here?

“It would be a new thing, Stormtroopers being taught this,” she insists.

“We aren’t taught. We teach ourselves. We’re still human!” he says, feeling defensive. “We want to live. They – the officers. If saving us takes too much time, credits or skill, they don’t. So there are all these protocols being passed on, learned by rote. Manoeuvres you show each other. Tricks, cheap replacement drugs and tools. Stormtrooper medicine.”

“Stormtrooper,” a voice echoes. Finn thinks it comes from Vice-Admiral Holdo’s ex-bridge officer.

He thinks expressions are clearer now. From a lot of them, he reads awe. From a few, fear. He can’t deal with any of this.

“You did very well, Finn,” the General says.

He has to get away. He begins to walk, faster and faster, toward the other corridor.

“Excuse me, please,” he hears himself say. “Please, let me go.”

The trapdoor to the back hold is over there. The holds are cold and they stink, but that’s his job, isn’t it, scrubbing out filth from the dark corners of a ship?

The portable sonic hose falls neatly on his head when he opens the compartment to retrieve it, then when he turns the corner with hose in hand he bumps into Poe.

“Finn? What’s the matter? I heard the commotion, what happened? Huh. Why the hose?”

Poe has already got his hands on Finn’s shoulder. Poe is always touching.

“Finn?”

“Poe!” comes General Organa’s voice, seemingly from very far. “Leave him be!”

“General, what happened?” Poe’s voice becomes soft, higher, concerned. “Finn?”

“Come here, Poe! Let him go. He needs to be alone.”

Poe’s hands unhook, leaving cold phantom sensations in place of warm living touch and maybe Finn isn’t so glad about it. He bolts, jumps down the ladder, hears the satisfying, definitive clang of the trapdoor falling shut.

 

He spends too much time pawing at the walls to find the light switch, finally reflecting that there’s probably one by the cargo door – so, exactly on the opposite side of the hold, – and that the other is certainly _above_ the trapdoor he just closed. He climbs the ladder back up, peeks out – nobody decided to go watch his breakdown closer –, finds the switch, closes the trapdoor more discretely than the first time and steps back down. More than half the lights are out anyway, painting the walls with irregular, suspiciously glinting shadows. It’s not that the walls are dirty as much as they are slimy. Big, brownish-orange patches, slightly raised, warty, maybe wiry, spread on every surface. A larger sonic hose hangs from the wall, the fasteners half rotten. There’s also a standard scrubbing brush abandoned in a corner, not as old as the rest.

Well, that’s something to pass his nerves on.

When he stops with both hoses, the brush and more hose he’s out of breath, his back is seizing up and his shoulders hurt, the right more than the left. He can’t remember having attacked dirt with so much violence and for so long before. He squints at his work in the dim light. He’s cleaned up a decent area, but not as much as he hoped – what he took for some kind of rust, a weird reaction between the Falcon’s old plastisteel and the Jakku atmosphere, maybe, must instead be organic, maybe even animal. Each of the patch he’s managed to unstick has exhaled one of the foulest stench he’s ever smelled, crinkling and crumbling into dry flakes once deprived of its support. But any that still clings on spreads back as soon as the pressure goes off. He thinks he can see one twitch out of the corner of his eye, catches a swift movement in the furthest shadows, hears a patter of – what? Mandibles? Feet? Tentacles?

“I’ll get you!” he howls, surging up, wielding the smallest hose like a crowd-control baton, spearing the patch through and through, sending ultrasounds from every side. “I’m gonna finish you!”

“Finn? Are you all right? Can I come down?”

Dammit, right when he was making a fool of himself. General Leia Organa.

“Sure,” he mumbles, then, louder. “Yes, come in!”

He’d thought Poe would come. Maybe Rey.

She’s got the Force. Maybe it’s true that they all can read your thoughts. “Rey is with Rose,” she says upon landing down. “Rose woke up, she’s very weak but she’s getting better. I think she’s telling Rey about those rings of hers. Before, they were piling hate on all the Unkar Plutts of the Galaxy.” She looks up to Finn – it surprises him, how small she is, how big she feels. “I told Poe I wanted to talk with you first.”

He’d offer her to sit down but there’s nothing in the hold except for the – granted, recently scraped – floor. In her long gown and thick, luxurious cloak, with her hair still impeccably coiffed, she looks regal, and he can’t imagine her squatting down. She feels lightyears above any Stormtrooper, ex- or not.

She looks around. “By the Force,” she murmurs, “it’s worse than I thought. What’s that slime?” She walks to the nearest patch of organic rust, kicks it, watches the thing’s wiry hair shiver. It makes her look less like a princess and more like a comrade. “Poor Han. Do you think he had the time to see this?”

“I don’t know. Rey and Chewbacca obviously had a go at it, though. There are areas where it’s not so widespread.”

“Thank you for going on with it, then. On Han’s behalf.” She purses her lips. “Poe, Rose and Rey ganged up on me, informing me janitor was one of your previous functions, and that you shouldn’t be made to feel, ah, obligated –” she pauses. “I should say, shouldn’t feel cornered to the point of going back – ah, I don’t want to sound like I disapprove –”

“Somebody has to do it,” Finn says, although of course he didn’t clean the hold out of a feeling of duty.

“But of course that’s not what it is. Too many new people?”

“I’m not what they think,” Finn mumbles.

“No,” Leia opines. “I’d say you’re even better. Thank you for joining the Resistance, Finn.”

“How do you know I joined?” He knows he wants to. In every true sense of the word, he did. He still wants to lash out – in this place, in this ship, however broken down and defeated and grieving, where doing so isn’t a death sentence.

“Because of your actions, do you want me to make a list?” she retorts, not in the mood for his game. “Because your friends are vouching for you.”

“I wanted to desert.”

“You did more than _want_ to! Finn, do you realise how unheard of it was that a Stormtrooper threw away a lifetime of conditioning to reject the First Order?”

“I mean I tried to desert the Raddus. Didn’t Rose tell you?”

She steps closer, which means she has to tilt her head up. Which means the power that radiates from her aging, slightly bent frame feels stronger than ever. Calmer, too.

“If you had come to me I’d have let you go. This wasn’t deserting, we never forced you to stay. And when I was, ah, incapacitated, Amilyn Holdo –” she halts. “Maybe not. But Poe would have found you a ship. Others, too.” She shakes her head. “I hate that she never completely understood… Ah. May she be one with the Force, and may the Force allow for jugai tea in the afterlife, or she’ll be _pissed_.”

Finn makes a vaguely respectful grunt. It’s low, he thinks. Contrasting his lack of ideals with Holdo’s lofty beliefs and ultimate sacrifice. Leia Organa looks straight into his eyes and smirks.

“She wasn’t better than you, Finn, you rebel. Do you still want to leave?” She’s searching for some truth in his eyes and maybe it’s not so easy, feeling people’s thoughts without violating their minds, because she still looks doubtful. “I’ll be frank. I’m counting on you to stay. After what I’ve seen today, I think it’s not only that you’re a good asset, it’s that we _need_ you, it’s that you made me, us, see our enemy in another light. But the choice is yours. We’ll never force people to fight for what they don’t believe in, even now. Especially now.”

It was easier when it was about fighting for people. The way Rose presented him the equation.

“What I believe in?” He voices out. “Beliefs, ideals, they’re for generals or vice-admirals! Not for people like me. Vice-Admiral Holdo, she spoke of renewing the Republic. When did the Republic ever care for people like me? Or for people like Rose, or those kids on Canto Bight?”

She sighs. “Easier for the Princess to talk about the Republic, eh.” Her eyes shift down, to the striped pants Finn now wears. “Han kept nagging me about that. Ah, dammit. I need you, the Resistance needs you, we all value you, you could save not only us but these people in white you came from, and I don’t seem to make any progress in telling you. I wish he was still there. He’d find the angle.”

She extends a hand to touch the ship’s wall – Finn catches a glimpse of a jacket under the cloak, Poe’s jacket? – trails her finger down in what’s nearly a caress, presses her mouth shut, hard. He hears her swallow.

“He loved me. He’s never stopped. I loved him. We went on each other’s nerves like a badly calibrated hyperspace engine and I could never stop loving him. But you know what? He didn’t come back for me. Never. He came back for the Rebellion. The Resistance. Whatever. For the fight, when we needed him. I never really could understand why. The Republic wasn’t kinder to his sort of people than the Empire. Why, Finn?”

She’s been leaning more heavily on the wall as she talked on, and when she finally straightens up Finn realises the effort it demands from her. Then he sees the glint in her eyes and knows she _let_ him witness this. It doesn’t make the surge of sympathy less real.

“You can’t say that he didn’t come back for you. Love was part of it, at least.” He grins. “In spite of his important misgivings.”

“Are you staying for someone, Finn?” she asks. “That’s not the wisest thing to do.”

“I was ready to _leave_ for Rey,” he answers, too fast to think better of it. Leia nods, eyes going down to the tracker she forgot to remove from her wrist.

“But you didn’t,” she states. “Anyone else?”

She has a weird expression and he wonders if she has some personal stakes in this, but he still thinks about it. He and Rey will always be here for each other, wherever the other is. Rose? She _is_ the Resistance in a way – the part of it he knows he belongs to, the closest he has to an ideal. Staying with the Resistance is staying with her, not the other way around.

Poe.

As his name jumps to Finn’s mind there’s no construct thought. Just a flood of images, the curve of a mouth, the curve of an ass. Hands, touching, arms, holding. The sound of a voice, laughter, fear, despair, resolve. Trust, going both ways. A smile. The breathtaking, deadly lines his ship carved in the air. His pulse, beating on his throat, him bloodied and tied in a chair, then clean and alive. Black eyes. Black hair. Wondering how he’ll look when it turns grey. A moment. A life.

 _Force_.

“You do have someone,” Leia says.

“I’m not joining _for_ him,” Finn ends saying, slowly. “But that we stand together – that’s good.”

“ _Good_ ,” she smiles. “Such a small word sometimes, to convey what we feel. I’m glad.”

“You just said staying for someone wasn’t wise!”

Her smile transforms her features now, making Finn wonder how he could only see her as a general. “Did I? Please be foolish, then. Sometimes it’s _good._ ” She nods, reverting to a more severe expression. “And you said you’re joining. Not only for him,” – her mouth softens at the _him_ – “so there must be some beliefs hidden in there.”

“Han,” Finn begins, because it’s easier to talk if it’s not directly about him – “I can’t say I knew him for a long time, but he was – he saw through my bullshit, yeah. And I liked him. So I think Han wouldn’t have moved a finger for big words but couldn’t stand injustice. And knew that about himself, that he couldn’t stay idle when he witnessed it.”

He thinks some more, feels a pang of grief and self-hate, ploughs on. “There was this man, the slicer who took us through the Supremacy defences and then betrayed everyone. He was a lot like Han, same self-awareness, same disdain for big words. Made him sort of – not really likeable, but magnetic? But he lacked what Han had – dunno how to call it, the will to make it better? Courage to stay on the losing side? I could have become like him.”

“You think so?” She shakes her head. “I don’t. _You’ve_ got the courage and the sense of justice. And something more that Han didn’t. He was a loner. You, Finn, you love people. Isn’t that what makes you go on?”

Finn hesitates. “Some people, yeah.”

“Many?”

He smiles. “All right, many.”

“And they love you back. Get used to it, you make a good leader.”

He’s _not_ getting used to hear this.

“That’s where we need you. Please.” Fatigue peeks out again, a crack in her voice, a head held up only by sheer force of will. She despaired on Crait, he remembers. After a whole adult life as a leader, she stumbled – recovered, maybe, but that must have been devastating.

Why him.

“You spoke of saving the people in white,” he says. Easier to think practically. “Stormtroopers, huh. You think it’s possible?”

“That’s because of you that I think it is, yes. Before, my only contact with your fellow troopers had been getting escorted in and out of torture chambers, basically. Did you know that Han and Luke disguised themselves with those armours, to get me out? I could only think how _not_ like Stormtroopers they looked. Too human, I thought. And now you’re teaching us all how human they are. Showing us that having them on our side is not only an unexpected way to end the First Order but a moral necessity.”

“What if they don’t want to be saved? Nobody changed sides on the Supremacy.”

“Would you have?”

“Ah. With Hux and Phasma here? Not likely. But Nines, all he wanted was to take me down.”

“Nines?”

“FN-2199. One of the troopers in my squad. Took me one-on-one on Takodana, didn’t have to. He’d have killed me if Poe hadn’t shot him.”

“I don’t believe everyone is like him. You – I mean the Stormtroopers are trying to save themselves, you said as much when you revealed this medical conspiration that’s going on. All it would take, maybe, is one person –”

Finn smiles, remembering Poe in the mine, and even Holdo, cold and determined, earlier. “We are the spark, was it?”

“A nice slogan, that.”

“And you got what you came here for,” Finn says, suddenly exhausted.

She is, too. Maybe that’s her exhaustion he feels. She only nods.

“Want to come back up with me?” she asks.

“No. I still – well, look at that,” he says with a sweeping gesture at the shadows and the not-quite-moving shapes. “This needs a thorough clean-up.” He pauses. “I’m sorry. Tell them I’m okay? It’s just –”

“All the faces?” She makes a closing down gesture with her hand in front of her face that clues him in.

He smirks. “We removed the helmet, you know. If only to eat. But something like that. Unselected faces. Uncalibrated.”

“You don’t like the diversity? I’m sorry if I’m too intrusive. You’re our only opportunity to learn, just say it if –”

“I love it! But it’s – draining.”

“Ah. Take your time, all right? Take care, Finn.”

He sees her take a circular look at the hold and shiver, and can’t help the step he takes to close the gap between them, the hand he passes over her shoulder. She turns to him, and the contact tears off the veil to reveal her bottomless grief and the white knuckled grip her will keeps on it not to break.

“Leia,” he breathes out. “I’m sorry. Take care.”

When she turns her head to him, she doesn’t try to hide the passing tremor of her mouth.

“Yes,” she says. “There’s something here. We will have to discuss it with Rey.”

He doesn’t understand any of this, but she’s already on the ladder, and then through the trapdoor.

“Fair warning,” she adds right before disappearing upwards. “Poe’s going to come down soon. Won’t listen to any advice not to.”

 

He can’t. No more strong feelings. He’s full, overflowing, close to tears. He climbs up, maybe to lock the door but you don’t lock your only way out in a ship, maybe to get out but when he’s reached the door he can’t move.

He remains here, balancing on the upper step, frozen by such a simple choice – is it how you know you’ve reached your limit?

A hiss, faint, metallic, like nails on steel, followed by the patter of – feet? Is I feet? in the furthest corner of the hold is what breaks the trance. His mind has nothing to do with it – the part that he thinks he controls, anyway. His hindbrain takes charge, the life-old conditioning that tells him either you jump to the training stimulus or you’re dead, a frozen body in the void.

He runs down to where he left the biggest hose, holds it up like a blaster to the area where – where he doesn’t see anything, except maybe a whiter blur in the darkness, moving? The blur resolves into something white with some orange, rounded – that’s not BB-8, BB-8’s taller, that’s a porg, that plunges down with a bird’s abruptness, joined with another, and yet another, all of them ducking down. The thing in which they’re sinking their maws – they have no beak, these birds, but sharp needle-like teeth in their cute mouths – ripples and contracts and begins to ooze some dark liquid, the nail-like sound getting louder.

Finn lays down the hose, watching with fascinated horror one of the parasites that were colonising the hold getting mauled by small fluffy animals, unable to do more than shift vaguely in defence against the onslaught. They’re eating it, tearing chunks, the rust-like liquid running down their immaculate feathers, until the last hold it had on the floor gets torn off and what’s left of it crumbles to dust, which prompts the porgs to retreat, running with their head forward on their cute palmed feet.

“Fuuuuck”, he exhales.

“Yeah,” a pensive voice says very close to him. “Now we know how the porgs were able to sustain themselves in space. Good for the ship, eh? We had an infestation like that on one of the scouting ships, wasn’t pretty.”

Finn jumps and turns.

“Poe! Damn, didn’t hear you come.”

“You looked taken by the sight,” Poe confirms. “How are you? Alright?”

This is not a question about the possible aftereffects of witnessing the true nature of porgs. There’s something in Poe’s voice that’s too intense, as is his stare, as is the grip on Finn’s shoulder.

“How I am,” he repeats, overwhelmed again, feeling his throat constrict. “How I am?”

Does he look as trapped as he feels? As unable as he is to assess himself? As angry to be confronted again to his own state?”

“I’m functional,” he says, reverting to the standard Stormtrooper response.

It doesn’t work on Poe, whose grip on Finn’s shoulder becomes painful. “Really?” he asks in a very soft voice.

“No!” Finn yells, watching himself grab Poe’s hand and tear it away. “No, I’m not alright! Why did you call for retreat, Poe? Why!”

For the first time since Finn met him – only a few days, and a lifetime of changes –, Poe appears speechless. He lets his arms fall down and takes a step back, only for Finn, who can’t have any more of this, to go forward so they’re face to face.

“We could have destroyed that canon,” Finn says. “I was almost there.”

“We’d have been like pebbles thrown into a furnace! You’d have melted away. For nothing.”

“How could you know!” Finn yells, hating how passive Poe feels against his anger. “I was ready! I’d have done something good, finally!”

Poe’s mouth is pressed into a thin line, lower lip trapped between his teeth, his eyes very large and glinting in the single, yellowish light from the wall.

“Do you want to hit me?” he asks.

Maybe, Finn thinks, right at the moment when he realises that’s not what he wants at all. Poe’s lips are bitten red and his upper teeth show just enough for Finn to notice that they’re slightly uneven. Finn looks down, shakes his head and steps backwards to the wall, sliding down to sit on the floor.

Poe goes to sit by his side, not so close as to try to touch him anymore.

“I know how it feels, to be on the receiving side of this kind of order,” he tells the shadows in front of him. “Only too well. I felt like a fraud giving it. And like – like I was being punished by, ah, a higher authority, by fate, when I saw you were going on.”

Finn grunts.

“Pilots are superstitious. I thought it was unfair that _you_ should pay for my mistakes,” Poe continues. To Finn it feels like his words are eaten by the shadows, passed around through the hold, going back to him with a noticeable lag. “I don’t _know_ whether our death would have made a difference with that cannon. There might have been a chance, yes. 3PO would give a more accurate figure, but one chance in a few millions at best. It was my role–” he grimaces, still looking ahead – “as a leader, to decide it wasn’t worth it.”

Finn opens his mouth to answer, most likely to object, when the trapdoor creaks open, laughter, slightly too loud and shrill, seeping through. Boots appear on the steps, prolonged by a khaki uniform, and then tight buns – Lieutenant Connix, head turned up to her companion, the sunray-haired pilot from earlier. The pilot, crouching over the ladder, trails her fingers across Connix’s face, then laughs again before she looks down and sees Poe and Finn.

“Oh!” she exclaims, “Kaydel, stop! I’m sorry, Commander, we didn’t want to –”

“Captain,” Poe corrects, dully, like he’s already used to make the correction and wants to keep on making it. “It’s alright, guys. No harm done.”

Connix snort and her companion laughs again, before they both take flight upwards. The door slams shut.

“What was that about?” Finn asks, feeling slightly bewildered.

Poe looks at Finn like he’s not really sure. “Fucking. They were looking for a place to fuck.”

“Here?” Finn says, eyeing the living patches of rust and the passing white shadows, sniffing the whiffs of foul smell coming from the carnage area.

Poe doesn’t catch his meaning. “Here more than anything. The ship’s full of people who saw death and want to feel alive, and what’s better –” he stops, shakes his head like he’s angry with himself. “Or maybe you haven’t – was it something the First Order, uh, repressed?”

“What?” Finn asks, realising how infinitely more complicated his life has become. “Fucking? After a mission? Poe, the First Order created an army of young people, what do you think? That they’d fight seriously against the easiest way to blow off steam?”

Poe looks at him extremely curiously now. His voice sounds altered, strangled maybe, when he asks: “and, uh, so, did you…”

“Once. I mean, with one trooper, a few times,” Finn says, watching Poe watching him. “It wasn’t all orgies in the dormitories, you know. You have to find a private corner to get on with it, and uh. Yeah. So. We had come back from training on the worst place ever, kind of like a planet-sized bog, Phasma had nearly beheaded everyone who wasn’t dead, we were washing off the slime and I thought he looked nice.”

Poe’s eyebrows minutely shoot up, then he nods for Finn to go on.

“Guess he thought I was good enough too. So, uh, we fucked a few times, then we stopped, then I wanted to do it again but he said we shouldn’t form bonds of this sort, which was right, of course. Best way to get thrown into space without a suit. So I never tried it with anyone else. Sort of felt like it wasn’t worth it.”

“Oh,” Poe says. “Yeah. I can imagine.”

Finn wonders if Poe’s going to tell him whether he’s done it too, and then, when he doesn’t look like he’s going to, whether Finn should ask. Maybe not. Poe is looking down at his feet, worrying the corner of this poncho-like garment he’s wearing again, playing with something in a pocket. Instead, Finn decides to go back to Crait. Right now, a discussion about bad military decisions feels at least more familiar than grilling Poe on fucking. And he feels like he needs to justify himself.

“I should have gone on and ended it in that cannon,” he says. “It was me who said it could be done. I thought I could have the final say. Something valuable I could do to save you all, or…”

Poe looks at him with an expression that’s so many emotions cobbled together Finn feels dizzy. Pain, guilt, understanding, maybe the tiniest hint of pride, and guilt again. Fear.

“No,” he says and then seems at a loss for how to go on. He keeps opening and closing his mouth, breaths coming faster and faster, until he repeats himself. “No. No ‘or’. You don’t owe us anything, Finn, we keep taking your heroism for granted, we – yes, heroism. Valuable, uh? I can see no value in your death!”

He shouted the last words, seems to deflate as fast as he puffed up. “Sorry. Pot, kettle. I’m one to talk.”

“The cannon was melting,” Finn hears himself say.

“Uh, what?”

“On my speeder. The light cannon mounted in the front. In the last meters it began to bend, then literally melted. I knew. That I would just disappear in that thing, burn to cinders. I hoped maybe it would still jam something, somehow. But it wasn’t what it was about. It just felt easy. Easier.”

“You wanted to die?” Poe asks, so softly Finn nearly doesn’t hear.

“Not really. But it felt easy. In a moment like this, you know you’re doing the right thing. You don’t doubt anymore.”

“And what comes after falls into the hands of others,” Poe completes, but there’s no judgement in his tone, only understanding.

“Yeah. You know the feeling.”

Poe nods. “Starkiller run. I went into it thinking I’d die.” He shrugs, grimaces. “And then nobody was more surprised than I to find I was still alive, and next thing I do is trying to replicate it with the dreadnought. Thinking a once-in-a-life desperate attempt can be turned into a strategy. Hubris.”

Somehow, they’ve shifted closer to each other, their shoulders nearly touching, hands only a hairbreadth apart.

“Or fear?” Finn asks, equally softly. “You can’t be blamed for fearing them. You had just witnessed their power. First hand in a torture chair.”

Poe shivers, then turns to Finn, his hand finally trapping Finn’s. “Listen,” he says, sitting straighter. “This, my being – being taken by Kylo Ren, this was nothing, nothing! In comparison to what you did. What you had to withstand.”

“I wasn’t tortured.”

“You turned your back away from your whole life. Any people you knew, any belief you were taught. More than this. You fought them, actively, for a bunch of idealistic fools you’d just met. And when you woke up from being so severely wounded you nearly died, Finn, you were in a coma for _days_ , you went back at them.” He licks his lips, bites them again – Finn can’t take his eyes away. “In circumstances as devastating, soul-crushing as that, anyone should only dream to think as clearly as you!”

“Poe, don’t –” Finn begins, unable to get the rest out. Don’t force me to face my feelings so soon. I’m drained, don’t make me think of who I am, don’t make me decide who I should be. Touch me, yeah. I need touch, I need rest, something, someone to soothe me, people to tell me what to do. Fuck me, tell me how you want me, make me feel good right now, make me forget, just like Connix and her friend.

The last, he nearly says aloud. Poe would agree, he can feel it. But then what? Would Poe still feel like coming to Finn, hold his hand and pour his heart out to him? Or would it be like with this trooper, whose squad Finn remembers, but whose serial number he never knew? Finn has Poe’s friendship. He doesn’t want to risk it.

“Do you still think dying would be easier?” Poe says, and _this_ feels like torture. Or maybe like draining a wound. Do you? Finn wants to ask, to deflect the question, to see if Poe is beginning to heal too.

And this, right then, gives him his answer. He wants to be there to see Poe heal, and maybe see if a friendship deeper than blood can lead to fucking too. He wants to sit by Rose’s side as she’s recovering, tell her she means the world for him, but not like she wishes, and apologise. He wants to stand beside Rey, whatever the cost, because he’ll always trust her. He wants to witness the Rebels connect throughout the Galaxy, grow, reduce the First Order to nothing.

“No,” he says. “I want to know what comes after. For Rose, Rey. And you, Poe.”

Poe smiles, if wanly. His eyes shift from looking straight on Finn’s to slightly lower, on his lips. He licks his own yet again.

“Do Stormtroopers kiss?” he asks.

“Never,” Finn answers. “Fucking is tolerated, affection isn’t.”

“Rose and Rey were talking of being kissed by you, right now.”

“Were they? I guess everyone’s still trying to figure out everything.”

“Do you think you’d like to kiss me too?”

“Would you like it?” Finn says, unable to take his eyes from Poe’s mouth. It’s very red from having been bitten and worried this long.

“I’m a fool,” Poe answers. “I’ll like whatever you want to give me.”

Finn tilts his head and bends forward, a repeat of his attempt with Rey. But Poe doesn’t meet him with his mouth, pulling him in completely instead, one hand on the nape of his neck and the other on his waist, light, warm.

“Do you want to keep your eyes open?” Poe whispers, which makes Finn realise that Poe’s lips were close, close enough for Finn to feel the warm puffs of his breath. He opens his eyes, sees Poe’s own, very dark, very big, on him.

“Yeah,” he says, liking how Poe is breathing in his own breath, and that’s how, when their lips finally connect, he has his mouth open and just _knows_ that’s how it should be. It’s like tasting, he reflects, and he might get used to it, trying to suck on Poe’s lower lip, getting a small, strangled grunt for his effort. It’s more than lips, he realises, when the hand that was on his hip goes up to cup his jaw, or it’s that lips feel every texture of the skin, smoothness shifting to roughness from Poe’s mouth to his unshaven cheek, it’s that skin wants more skin, cold noses bumping, warmth in the hollow of Poe’s throat, his pulse beating, frantic.

It’s that the other wants it too, the taste, the touch, the warmth, that Poe takes Finn’s face in both hands, hard, that he smashes their mouths together, their teeth clinking, Finn’s hand going up to pull Poe even closer, tangling in his hair, nails digging. “Tongue,” Poe manages to say with a smile that Finn feels on his lips, so Finn tries it, and what should feel wet and weird feels hot and more intimate than anything Finn ever did with dicks.

It’s Poe who breaks the kiss, reluctantly, with a sigh. One of his hands remains on Finn’s cheek, his index tracing small circles on Finn’s temple, his thumb going, once, across his lips. Finn turns and kisses his palm. Desire is tangible between them, a thickness of the air, a buzz in Finn’s ears, a tension in their bodies. It’s walking on the edge, high up, and Finn wants to jump or maybe keep walking here until the end of times.

Poe was looking at him, scrutinizing him for some clue, and Finn realises it when he appears to reach a conclusion, sitting straighter and stroking Finn’s jaw before removing his hand.

“Sorry for the beard burn,” he says, swallowing hard. “I meant to shave but…”

“Yeah. The Falcon’s a bit short on toiletries,” Finn says, his fingers going to feel around his own mouth by their own accord. It’s sort of tingling there. “Hey, but I’m clean shaven! Huh, sort of.”

Poe grins. “Lucky you, your beard’s growing out slower than mine.”

“No, I mean, how long has it been, more than one week since I – who shaved me? Is it something your medics do?”

Finn would swear Poe colours a bit around the ears. “No, uh, not under such pressure as an evacuation, I – yeah, I shaved you once or twice while you were unconscious.”

“And you patched up the jacket, too.”

“Inbetween getting the squadrons ready, yeah. Thought you’d like it.”

“I did! It was my first garment – and when I picked it up, I thought it’d be the only thing I’d have from you, you know. And now DJ’s gone with it.”

“DJ?”

“The slicer.”

“So my jacket didn’t burn with the supremacy, huh.”

“No. I left it in DJ’s ship. And if I put my hands on that fucking traitor…”

“You’ll pry that jacket from his cold, dead hands?”

“Totally.”

“And meanwhile you’re shivering. Only a shirt, in the hold? It’s fucking cold!”

“I was much too warm and sweating buckets when I came in.”

“Yeah. Understandably. Hey, let me –” Poe feels Finn’s fingers, then the tip of his nose. Finn represses a shiver, the warmth from the kiss already gone. “As I thought. You’re freezing.”

Finn tries to do the same with Poe’s nose – not so warm itself, but at least Poe’s wearing this poncho thing – in a flash, he remembers Leia’s raised hand and the glimpse of Poe’s jacket under her cloak.

“Do you give away jackets to everyone you like?” he can’t help asking.

Poe looks down on his poncho-covered self, then up at Finn, and his crooked smile probably echoes all the doubts in Finn’s mind.

“Don’t have any more to give, sadly,” he answers. “You saw the General wearing the other one? She was cold. I think what she did to bring herself back cost her too much and it frightens me, Finn.”

“Do you love her?” Finn can’t help asking, and is baffled by Poe’s immense smile in answer.

“Oh yeah. Not like – there are many ways to love.”

Finn thinks of Rey and Rose, and of Poe. “I know,” he says. “Or at least I think I’m learning about it. Where’s this poncho from?”

“Rey.” Poe’s smile becomes even larger. It makes him look silly. “She told me it suited me.”

Finn smiles, then snorts, then laughs. “Really? Because…”

“Not everyone can look smashing in lent garments, you know.” He grabs the poncho, lifts the front up. “Hey, you know what’s good about this, though? It’s that the head-hole is large enough for two. Come on in, man. It’s warm inside.”

Finn doesn’t move fast enough, and Poe lowers his hands slowly. “Unless you’d rather go back up, of course.”

“No! No, up feels – I like to be here with you.”

“Yeah, me too,” Poe says, all the warmth of the galaxy in his voice. “In spite of the smell.”

“And the rust-things and the porgs,” Finn grins.

He scoots towards Poe, plunges down his front – Poe shivers – re-emerges with his hair against Poe’s face and his back snuggled tight, the poncho covering them both. Something hard and cylindrical digs into his thigh, a small bottle maybe, in one of the pockets of the poncho.

“What’s that?” he asks.

“Oh.” Poe slides his hand out, around Finn and into the pocket, and digs, yes, a bottle out. “That was my strategy to give myself a reason to find you.”

“Uh?”

“That’s why I asked you how you are. I meant, your back.”

“My back what?”

“You’re walking very stiffly.”

“Sure, of course, I slept on the floor, and I was lucky that I only had bruises from the speeder crash, but…”

“Kylo Ren drove a fucking lightsaber through your back, that’s what it is. Not the floor, not the speeder, although I can’t imagine it helped. You don’t normally stand up and run to battle when waking up from such a wound, Finn.”

“What do you do, then?” Finn asks, not wanting to tell Poe that no Stormtrooper ever woke up from a wound as serious as this one – maybe that’s why he was sort of thinking around it, acknowledging every small reason but the main one.

“Apply medication,” Poe says, shaking the bottle before Finn’s face. He snorts. “Take it easy. Get cared for.”

“How do you apply this?” Finn asks, squinting on the bottle label. “What does it do?”

“You don’t know? That’s standard post-bacta care, I thought, after how you saved Rose…”

“No. I don’t know anything about post-bacta, Poe.”

“Fuck. Okay. Well, it minimises scarring and helps with muscle re-growth, and you massage it through the skin.”

“I can’t reach behind well enough.”

“Yeah, _I_ can.” There’s a kind of immense tenderness in the way Poe tells it, as well as in how his limbs embrace him, like a cocoon, like a shield. “Do you want me to do it now?”

“Too cold. Just hold me, Poe. Like this. I – it’s good.”

“Alright,” Poe says, setting the bottle down beside them.

The poncho is, in truth, surprisingly warm. Finn feels arms around him again, and Poe’s stomach going up and down with each breath against his back. He might feel Poe getting hard somewhere in the region of his buttocks as well – he knows he is, sort of, not to the point that he has to do something about it, just as a reminder that they will need, in time, to see what they want to do about it. It’s comfortable, even more so when he feels warm breath on his ear and a kiss, short and sweet, on his neck. He traps Poe’s hands in his and squeezes.

After a while, Poe’s breathing takes a strange rhythm, a staccato inspiration and a long release, a stop, and a long breath again, too fast for a while, and then very deep. It’s only when Finn feels wetness on his neck that he understands that Poe is crying, as stealthily as he can. He’s seen how close Poe is to many of the Rebels, and not only in the way a leader is close to his crew. It’s friends for whom he’s crying.

To Finn it feels more abstract – he’s grieving the time he didn’t have with Han, and a friendship that could have been born out of different circumstances with Slip. The rest, he sees through Poe’s eyes and his own feelings of guilt at being unable to prevent the bloodbath. But it also gives him enough hindsight to realise the horror of the bigger picture. In the space of two weeks, the several hundreds dead the Resistance have joined the innocent villagers from Jakku, battalions upon battalions of Stormtroopers who died on Starkiller, all these others who weren’t evacuated from the Supremacy – was his half-anonymous lover among them? – and the billions of innocents on Hosnia. It doesn’t make him want to cry, but it makes him want to howl.

“At least nobody had their kids on the base,” Poe blurts, sounding raw.

And finally Finn feels the tears well up. For these kids somewhere far away who lost their parents. For the Stormtroopers who never knew them. For himself, who longed for them, for his twenty-two years of life wasted trying to fit into a cruel mould. And in gratitude, for the family he’s found amidst the tragedy.

Some time later, he turns around and there, in the darkened womb of Han’s ship, under the protection of Rey’s garment, kisses Poe’s mouth, tasting salt, and love. 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter took me time, and I sort of became very attached to it. I hadn't planned so much romance initially but it sort of wrote itself. So please, tell me what you thought? <3

**Author's Note:**

> Hope you liked.  
> Apologies for the probable wonky writing: still not a native speaker, any help is appreciated!
> 
> Want to join me for infrequent posting, TLJ apology and the occasional fanart? Here's my tumblr [la-tarasque](https://la-tarasque.tumblr.com/).


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